Treesearch

To remain viable, agricultural producers will need to adapt to changing climatic conditions in coming decades. Agricultural advisers play an important role in helping producers decide to adopt appropriate adaptation practices. Photovisualizations have the potential to complement currently utilized outreach and education strategies. This research uses a focus group approach to explore (1) whether photovisualizations can aid in decision-making about climate change adaptation, and (2) what characteristics of photovisualizations are most effective at conveying spatial aspects of adaptation...

The pine bark adelgid, Pineus strobi (Hartig) (Hemiptera: Adelgidae), is an herbivore native to eastern North America that specialises on eastern white pine, Pinus strobus Linnaeus (Pinaceae). Little is known about P. strobi, especially in its southern range in the Appalachian Mountains, United States of America, and the composition of its predator complex has not yet been documented in this region. The current study identifies arthropod predators associated with P. strobi in Appalachian forests of Virginia based on a two-year survey. Predators were identified using morphology and DNA...

Prescribed (i.e., controlled) burning is a common practice used in many vegetation types in the world to accomplish a wide range of land management objectives including wildfire risk reduction, wildlife habitat improvement, forest regeneration, and land clearing. To properly apply controlled fire and reduce unwanted fire behavior, an improved understanding of fundamental processes related to combustion of live and dead vegetation is needed. Since the combustion process starts with pyrolysis, there is a need for more data and better models of pyrolysis of live and dead fuels. In this study,...

Urban parkland is a quintessential form of public space. Various actors—from government managers, to civic groups, to individual visitors—actively negotiate and co-create the governance, use, and meaning of parks. One form of negotiation occurs through signage and writing. Here, we focus on 42 parks in New York City and the multiple narratives within them. Through coding the messages, material qualities, and meanings in 784 signs, qualitative analysis of graffiti in parks, triangulated with ethnographic field notes, we identify and discuss what sort of urban park subjectivities are being...

A new frontier in clinical disease diagnostics was quietly launched by a series of recent discoveries of dysbiosis-related phenomena. These developments make important connections between the metabolic activities of resident microbes and human diseases. Numerous studies have demonstrated that biochemical mechanisms leading to disease development involve not only pathogenesis, but also interactions between microbiota in the oral cavity, lungs, and gut, as well as the microbial metabolites they produce, and the human immune system. Microbial dysbiosis (MD) or changes in commensal microbiota...

The Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study was established to use the small watershed approach to measure and model ecosystem element flux and cycling, but it has evolved to incorporate a complex matrix of projects studying a wide range of biogeochemical and ecological phenomenon. Fundamental to understanding many of these phenomenon is information regarding the structure and function of the defining life form there – trees. The northern hardwood-conifer forest that blankets the Hubbard Brook valley is a biological machine that transforms solar energy, water and mineral nutrients into organic...

Despite being a significant input into soil carbon pools of many high-latitude ecosystems, little is known about the effects of climate change on the turnover of mycorrhizal fungal necromass. Here, we present results from the first experiment examining the effects of climate change on the long-term decomposition of mycorrhizal necromass, utilising the Spruce and Peatland Response Under Changing Environments (SPRUCE) experiment. Warming significantly increased necromass decomposition rates but was strongest in normally submerged microsites where warming caused water table drawdown. Necromass...

Groundwater exchanges with most lakes are rarely quantified because there are many technical challenges to quantification. We investigated a lakebed mapping approach to infer the relative areas of groundwater exchange in 12 prairie shallow lakes and five Laurentian mixed forest shallow lakes in Minnesota, USA in 2011. We used a relatively common approach (seepage meters) to provide baseline information on the magnitude and direction of flow at four locations in each lake. To expand from point measurements to the whole-lake scale, we explored use of specific conductivity as a cheaper and...

The spread of invasive species can have far-reaching environmental and ecological consequences. Understanding invasion spread patterns and the underlying process driving invasions are key to predicting and managing invasions. We combine a set of statistical methods in a novelway to characterize local spread properties and demonstrate their application using simulated and historical data on invasive insects. Our method uses a Gaussian process fit to the surface of waiting times to invasion in order to characterize the vector field of spread. Using this method, we estimate with statistical...

In eastern North America, the invasive hemlock woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae Annand), has expanded northward at a pace that exceeds predictions from mechanistic models, suggesting successful long-distance dispersal despite the only viable dispersive phase being a flightless nymph, or "crawler." We hypothesize that migrating birds may contribute to long-distance dispersal of crawlers by passively transporting them in their plumage during northward migration. We collected hemlock woolly adelgid crawlers from the plumage of wild birds in Connecticut hemlock forests in spring and summer...