Treesearch

Urban ecology began as a biological science practised within cities. As such, it sought out forests, abandoned or undeveloped land, meadows and surface waters as analogues of the places outside of cities where ecologists had worked for decades. In 1997, the call for proposals by the National Science Foundation's Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) programme for urban research sites required integration of biological and physical structures and processes with social structures and processes. The Baltimore Ecosystem Study, referred to as BES, was one of the two successful responses to that...

Whole-tree harvesting practices are often restricted on soils with intrinsically low soil nutrients. Delineating restricted soil components from nonrestricted components presents a challenge for forest practitioners working with glaciofluvial parent materials. We investigated a suite of biological and edaphic factors to assess if restricted soil components are functionally distinct from nonrestricted soil components in partially restricted soil complexes across northern Wisconsin, USA. This study tested repeatable methods for soil delineation based on soil particle size, varying in spatial...

Arid and semiarid ecosystems drive year-to-year variability in the strength of the terrestrial carbon (C) sink, yet there is uncertainty about how soil C gains and losses contribute to this variation. To address this knowledge gap, we embedded C-depleted soil mesocosms, containing litter or biocrust C inputs, within an in situ dryland ecosystem warming experiment. Over the course of one year, changes in microbial biomass and total soil organic C pools were monitored alongside hourly measurements of soil CO2 flux. We also developed a biogeochemical model to explore the mechanisms that gave...

Tropical ecosystems are expected to experience climate warming, with predicted increases in drying and heat extremes in the coming years. Understanding how these changes will affect terrestrial vertebrates such as amphibians is limited. The Tropical Responses to Altered Climate Experiment in the Luquillo Experimental Forest in northeastern Puerto Rico allows us to study how the tropical forest responds to warming within a replicated plot design. From September 2018 to August 2019, we used mark-recapture sampling to investigate how the spatial population ecology of the common coqui frog...

Forest lands are sometimes thought to increase evapotranspiration (ET) and decrease water yield (WYLD) morethan those of croplands, especially in the semi-arid subtropical and tropical regions. Using the US-EPA (EnvironmentalProtection Agency)'s Hydrologic and Water Quality System (HAWQS) model along with Mann Kendallstatistics (τ) and Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, I compared ET and WLYD between a cropland and a forest land in ahumid subtropical region - Yazoo River basin (YRB), Mississippi, USA – under the changing climate. Resultsshow that no temporal trend of ET was found over the past...

Changes in pollutant concentrations in environmental media occur both from pollutant transport in water or air and from local processes, such as adsorption, degradation, precipitation, straining, and so on. The terms "fate and transport" and "transport and fate" reflect the coupling of moving with the carrier media and biogeochemical processes describing local transformations or interactions. The Journal of Environmental Quality(JEQ) was one of the first to publish papers on fate and transport (F&T). This paper is a minireview written to commemorate the 50th anniversary of JEQ and show how...

Many mammalian species have experienced range contractions. Following a reduction in distribution that has resulted in apparently small and disjunct populations, the Humboldt marten (Martes caurina humboldtensis) was recently designated as federally Threatened and state Endangered. This subspecies of Pacific marten occurring in coastal Oregon and northern California, also known as coastal martens, appear unlike martens that occur in snow-associated regions in that vegetation associations appear to differ widely between Humboldt marten populations. We expected current distributions represent...

Estrogenic hormones and organic ultraviolet-filters (UV-filters) have attracted increased attention as endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) due to their potent estrogenicity and widespread occurrence in the environment. This study investigated the accumulation of three estrogenic hormones and five UV-filters in red swamp crayfish (Procambarus clarkii). Exposure experiments were conducted for 42 days with a mixture of EDCs at two environmentally-relevant design concentrations (i.e., 500 and 5000 ng L−1). The aqueous-phase EDC concentrations decreased over time and were re-established every...

Dams fragment the longitudinal flux of sediment and obstruct fish passage. To help remediate these impacts, dam removal has become an important tool in the river restoration toolkit. Scientifically, these removals also provide an important experimental design, fixed in time and space, to quantify geomorphic and ecological responses to removal of a disturbance. Using the removal of a 6 m high dam in Massachusetts (USA), we quantify the immediate and subsequent channel and ecological recovery to test whether the immediate ecological/geomorphic responses were sustained or transient. Initial...

Climate change adaptation requires that we anticipate future conditions that may deviate from our historical experiences. Our ability to do so is associated with the perceived proximity of decision-outcomes. Through analysis of semi-structured interviews with farmers in the northeastern United States, we conclude that temporal distance (now versus later) and social distance (self versus other) of climate impacts interact to play important roles in climate risk perception. Using Psychological Distance and Construal Level Theory, we identified two distinct temporal perspectives, historically...