Treesearch

Floodplain forests provide valuable ecosystem services, yet human activity has degraded many of these riverine systems. Previous investigations of floodplain forest composition have frequently focused on flooding without incorporating successional dynamics; however, their restoration requires understanding both. We investigated floodplain forest composition along both flooding and succession gradients. River meandering builds new floodplain land with a variable microtopography and diverse levels of flood exposure. We compared vegetation to floodplain land ages on chronological sequences....

Globalization has undeniably impacted the Earth’s ecosystems, but it has also influenced how we think about natural systems. Three fourths of the world’s forests are now altered by human activity, which challenges our concepts of native ecosystems. The dichotomies of pristine vs. disturbed as well as our view of native and non-native species, have blurred; allowing us to acknowledge new paradigms about how humans and nature interact. We now understand that the use of militaristic language to define the perceived role of a plant species is holding us back from the fact that novel systems...

The use of indicator species can simplify bird monitoring by reducing the level of specialized skills needed, which increases the potential pool of participants and reduces training costs and complexity. To facilitate monitoring in the humid forests of northeast Central America, we conducted point count surveys for birds across gradients of disturbance in the Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary, Belize, and analyzed the association of bird species with remotely sensed metrics of forest condition and anthropogenic disturbance using indicator species analysis. Twenty species exhibited...

Aims. Climate warming in northern ecosystems is triggering widespread permafrost thaw, during which deep soil nutrients, such as nitrogen, could become available for biological uptake. Permafrost thaw shift frozen organic matter to a saturated state, which could impede nutrient uptake. We assessed whether soil nitrogen can be accessed by the deep roots of vascular plants in thermokarst bogs, potentially allowing for increases in primary productivity. Methods. We conducted an ammonium uptake experiment on Carex aquatilis Wahlenb. roots excavated from thermokarst bogs in interior Alaska....

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...