Black cohosh (Actaea racemosa L.) rhizomes are harvested extensively from eastern North American forests and sold worldwide for treatment of menopausal symptoms. While forest farming is encouraged to reduce wild-harvest impacts, little information is available to aid landowners in successfully cultivating black cohosh. This study examined survival and multi-year growth of 200 black cohosh rhizomes collected from an Appalachian deciduous forest and transplanted to a similar forest type.

Changing landowner demographics and the increasing recognition that some quantity of woody plants is valuable for certain rangeland management objectives has led to increasing interest in selective brush management practices. Brush Busters is a collaborative extension/research program developed in response to this growing interest. A survey of Texas County Extension Agents-Agriculture was conducted in 1999 to determine their perceptions about the interest in and adoption of Brush Busters practices.

Market-based approaches to conservation provide two novel policy outcomes. First, they secure public environmental benefits through incentive payments to private landowners to deliver those conservation outcomes that are unlikely to be achieved through regulation. Second, they provide opportunities to influence perceptions, motivations and values, and shift behaviors among landowners towards biodiversity conservation. Here we report on our experiences in engaging private landowners through two large market-based conservation programs funded by the Australian government.

Forestry is an important source of income for forest owners and those employed in rural areas. In recent years, this sector has had to tackle far-reaching changes taking place in the social, economic and political system. New demands are now being addressed and policies reformulated. As a response to this pressure, new decision-making structures and innovation activities are taking place in the forestry sector. The aim of this paper is to study learning processes on the management level of forest enterprises.

This study explores the factors that influence obtaining forest certification in the U.S. Pacific Northwest (PNW). A mail survey sent to certified and non-certified forest managing entities (public agencies, forest industry and non-industrial private forest owners) was conducted. The study hypothesized the importance of sixteen biogeographical and socio-economic factors in facilitating the adoption of forest certification. Three of these factors (market pressure, land ownership pattern and water-body abundance) were found to influence the decision to obtain forest certification in the U.S.

A voluntary conservation approach may reveal environmentally minded landowners who are willing to protect their lands with a compensation that is lower than the market price based compensation. Consequently, voluntary conservation programs may induce lower costs than traditional obligatory programs, such as a land taking. We compared the costs accrued from land purchasing with those from temporal land leasing. The costs included both direct costs, such as fees of land acquisition and compensation payments in land leasing, and transaction costs.

A survey was conducted among 126 experts to assess a comprehensive array of 44 research, development, and deployment (RD&D) needs previously identified by landowners (Marchand and Masse 2008) for four short-rotation plantation or agroforestry systems based on willow or hybrid poplar in Canada.

The Corymbia and Eucalyptus species eaten by koalas are generally large trees, but these are often unpopular with urban landowners and councils because of the dangers of limbs falling from a great height. We aimed to develop shorter koala food and habitat trees for urban areas by heterografting tall eucalypt species onto rootstocks of shorter species and comparing their survival and growth with homografted trees and control ungrafted trees.

Forested riparian buffers isolate streams from the influence of harvesting operations that can lead to water temperature increases. Only forest cover between the sun and stream limits stream warming, but that cover also reduces in-stream photosynthesis, aquatic insect production, and fish productivity. Water temperature increases that occur as streams flow through canopy openings decrease rapidly downstream, in as little as 150 m.