Treesearch

Climate projections predict higher temperatures and more frequent hurricanes in the tropics. Tropical plants subjected to these stresses may respond by acclimating their physiology. We investigated tropical forest root respiration in response to in situ experimental warming and hurricane disturbance in eastern Puerto Rico. We measured mass-normalized root specific respiration, root biomass, and root traits at the Tropical Responses to Altered Climate Experiment (TRACE), where understory vegetation is warmed + 4 °C above ambient. Our measurements span 5 years, including before and after two...

Freshwaters require targeted policy considerations to achieve biodiversity conservation goals and to support ecosystem services that communities around the globe depend upon. Effective conservation requires creative solutions that build and expand upon conventional protected areas, contextualized for these diverse ecosystems. Global recognition of the need for protection targeting inland waters has lagged behind protections for marine and terrestrial ecosystems, likely contributing to the greatest biodiversity losses occurring among freshwater species1. In December 2022, at the Convention...

Recent stream restoration approaches, such as Stage 0 restoration, aim to restore natural processes to regain lost ecosystem functions, but project implementation can also represent a reach-scale disturbance. Assumed outcomes of these restoration actions, like greater biological productivity, are rarely evaluated. In this study, we examined the short-term effects of Stage 0 floodplain restoration on the secondary production of aquatic macroinvertebrate communities in the South Fork McKenzie River, Oregon, 1–2 years following project implementation. We seasonally sampled macroinvertebrates...

1. Pulsed subsidy events create ephemeral fluxes of hyper-abundant resources that can shape annual patterns of consumption and growth for recipient consumers. However, environmental conditions strongly affect local resource availability for much of the year, and can heavily impact consumer foraging and growth patterns prior to pulsed subsidy events. Thus, a consumer's capacity to exploit pulse subsidy resources may be influenced by antecedent environmental conditions, but this has rarely been shown in nature and is unknown in aquatic ecosystems.2. Here, we sought to understand the importanc...

The purpose of this paper is to present an argument for why there is a need to re-envision the underlying culture of undergraduate biology education to ensure the success, retention, and matriculation of Black students. The basis of this argument is the continued noted challenges with retaining Black students in the biological sciences coupled with existing research that implicates science contexts (i.e., the cultural norms, values, and beliefs manifesting through policies and practices) as being the primary source of the challenges experienced by Black students that lead to their attrition...

Nitrogen (N) is a critical element in many ecological and biogeochemical processes in forest ecosystems. Cycling of N is sensitive to changes in climate, atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations, and air pollution. Streamwater nitrate draining a forested ecosystem can indicate how an ecosystem is responding to these changes. We observed a pulse in streamwater nitrate concentration and export at a long-term forest research site in eastern North America that resulted in a 10-fold increase in nitrate export compared to observations over the prior decade. The pulse in streamwater...

This summary report provides an overview of findings from the ninth inventory of Michigan forests based on visits to 4,367 forested plots from 2013 to 2019. Until the 2019 inventory, the base estimate of Michigan forest land had been increasing since the 1980 inventory. The 2019 inventory has 20.2 million acres of forest land. Timberland accounts for 95 percent of this forest land, and 61 percent is privately owned. The sugar maple/beech/yellow birch forest type accounts for 19 percent of Michigan forest land, followed by aspen (12 percent) and white oak/red oak/hickory (7 percent). Balsam...

Spatial data metrics are commonly used to capture environmental quality for recreation and visitation studies. Spatial data and tools, such as viewshed analysis, provide methods to incorporate spatial attributes into nonmarket valuation studies of consumer preferences, like portraying changes in visual-sensory qualities (e.g., from wildfires). We review the use of viewsheds in the nonmarket valuation literature and summarize insights from viewshed-based studies in other disciplines. We offer a conceptual framework for how to incorporate viewsheds into recreation demand studies, including...

Efforts to catalog global biodiversity have often focused on aboveground taxonomic diversity, with limited consideration of belowground communities. However, diversity aboveground may influence the diversity of belowground communities and vice versa. In addition to taxonomic diversity, the structural diversity of plant communities may be related to the diversity of soil bacterial and fungal communities, which drive important ecosystem processes but are difficult to characterize across broad spatial scales. In forests, canopy structural diversity may influence soil microorganisms through...

Due to the increased frequency of human–tick encounters and expanding ranges of ticks in the United States, there is a critical need to identify environmental conditions associated with tick populations and their likelihood to contact human hosts. In a passive tick surveillance partnership with the US Department of Agriculture Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program, we identified environmental variables associated with tick encounters by forestry personnel. Ticks were identified by species and life stage, and site-specific variables were associated with each tick using FIA forest...