Treesearch

Floral traits such as color, scent, and nectar often vary substantially within plant species. However, when it comes to pollen chemistry, the scale of intraspecific variation is largely unknown, as are its potential abiotic drivers. Bees collect pollen as their primary source of protein and lipids, and interspecific variation in pollen quality influences bee foraging preferences. Understanding the scale of intraspecific spatiotemporal variation in pollen macronutrient content could further uncover the nutritional basis of many plant-pollinator interactions influenced by geographic and...

In environmental and natural resource social science, place has often been characterized with rootedness and stationarity, which neglects important, dynamic connections between people and place(s). In this chapter, we (1) reexamine certain assumptions in place literature about human-mobility and place-change as necessarily jeopardizing the role of place(s) in our lives and (2) explore how a more relational, pluralistic, and dynamic view of place and place-making can help us navigate accelerating anthropogenic change and uncertainty. We hope that by moving from roots to rhizomes as an...

Uncertainty and change are increasingly commonplace as communities respond to impacts of social-ecological change including climate change, and dangerous levels of pollution. Given the extent of these crises, new approaches are needed to support responses. Here we identify challenges and discuss insights that the nexus of Senses of place (SoP) and mobilities research offers in navigating such uncertainty. We conducted a two-round Delphi, followed by a workshop, and collaborative writing process with a global network of researchers with expertise in either or both SoP and mobilities...

Space-based laser altimetry has revolutionized our capacity to characterize terrestrial ecosystems through the direct observation of vegetation structure and the terrain beneath it. Data from NASA’s ICESat-2 mission provide the first comprehensive look at canopy structure for boreal forests from space-based lidar. The objective of this research was to create ICESat-2 aboveground biomass density (AGBD) models for the global entirety of boreal forests at a 30 m spatial resolution and apply those models to ICESat-2 data from the 2019-2021 period. Although limited in dense canopy, ICESat-2 is...

Patterns of abundance across space and time, and intraspecific variation in body size, are two species attributes known to influence diet breadth and the structure of interaction networks. Yet, the relative influence of these attributes on diet breadth is often assumed to be equal among taxonomic groups, and the relationship between intraspecific variation in body size on interaction patterns is frequently neglected. We observed bee-flower interactions in multiple locations across Montana, USA, for two growing seasons and measured spatial and temporal patterns of abundance, along with...

Increasing impacts from wildfires are reshaping fire policies worldwide, with expanded investments in a wide range of fuel reduction strategies. In many fire prone regions, especially in the Mediterranean basin, fuel management programs have relied on fuel break networks for decades to facilitate fire suppression and reduce area burned and damage. By contrast, on the fire prone federal forests in the western United States, fuel management is guided primarily by landscape restoration goals, including improving fire resiliency such that wildfires can be managed for ecological benefit, and...

Scholars featured in a recent special issue of the Journal of Park and Recreation Administration and others have noted that public lands management has yet to integrate sustainable recreation policy and practice (Cerveny et al., 2022, p. 1). Additionally, there is growing recognition that inter-agency and scientist-citizen collaboration are needed to achieve this goal. In this commentary, we offer an example of minding the science-practice gap through co-creating research. Specifically, we describe how scientists from the US Forest Service and the University of California, Davis, and...

C4 perennial bioenergy grasses are an economically and ecologically important group whose responses to climate change will be important to the future bioeconomy. These grasses are highly productive and frequently possess large geographic ranges and broad environmental tolerances, which may contribute to the evolution of ecotypes that differ in physiological acclimation capacity and the evolution of distinct functional strategies.C4 perennial bioenergy grasses are predicted to thrive under climate change - C4 photo- synthesis likely evolved to enhance photosynthetic efficiency under...

The need for widespread occurrence data to inform species conservation has prompted interest in large, national-scale environmental DNA (eDNA) monitoring strategies. However, targeted eDNA assays are seldom validated for use across broad geographic areas. Here, we validated 46 new and previously published probe-based qPCR assays targeting invasive species throughout the continental United States. We drew upon current taxonomies, range maps, publicly available sequences, and tissue archives to evaluate all potentially sympatric confamilial species and genetically similar extrafamilial taxa....

While the influence of canopy trees on soils in natural and restored forest environments is well studied, the influence of understory species is not. Here, we evaluate the effects of outplanted native woody understory on invasive grass biomass and soil nutrient properties in heavily grass-invaded 30 +year-old plantations of a native N-fixing tree Acacia koa in Hawai‘i. We analyze soils from under A. koa trees with versus without planted woody understory and compare these to soils from under remnant pasture trees of the pre-deforestation dominant, Metrosideros polymorpha where passive...