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Plants' Role In Global Warming
In a Perspectives paper published April 28 by Science, a team led by Tony King cites ORNL findings suggesting that about 9 percent more carbon will be stored in plants and soil with the acclimation of plants included in the model. While this amount is relatively small compared to different climate-carbon simulations performed over the years, the authors note that this acclimation phenomenon should not be ignored. "This is carbon that might otherwise be released to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and could further influence future climate change," said King, a researcher in ORNL's Environmental Sciences Division. "Our ability to accurately predict global change over the next several decades depends upon having a thorough understanding of multiple interacting factors, including plant respiration. "The fact is that plants adapt to higher temperatures and their levels of respiration adjust downward." While some prior climate-carbon simulations have included differentiation among vegetation types, none have incorporated an explicit time-dependent acclimation of plant respiration to increasing temperatures. ORNL scientists also looked at the influence of temperature acclimation at both the local ecosystem and global scales......... Posted by: Erica Permalink Source Biotech Cotton Provides Same Yield
The finding comes from the first large-scale study that simultaneously examined how growing Bt cotton affects yield, pesticide use and biodiversity. It's good news for the environment. "What we see is that it's positive here in Arizona -- no doubt about it," said Yves Carrière, an associate professor of entomology at The University of Arizona in Tucson. "We've reduced pesticide use in Arizona. We've wanted to do that for 25 years". Bt cotton has been genetically altered to produce Bt toxin, a naturally occurring insecticide that kills pink bollworm, a major pest of cotton. Bt cotton has been planted in Arizona since 1996. Now more than half of the state's 256,000 acres of cotton fields are planted with the biotech plants. Some have suggested that, in addition to killing the target pests, insecticide-containing crops like Bt cotton would also kill beneficial and non-target arthropods. The new study found that Bt cotton, also known as transgenic cotton, does not affect the biodiversity of insects in cotton fields. Carrière said, "There were lots of factors that affected biodiversity in this study. Transgenics were not one of them"......... Posted by: Erica Permalink Source Botanist And The Vintner - Book Review
The bare bones of the story will be familiar to most wine drinkers. Phylloxera was introduced into a French vineyard in the Rhone Valley on the roots of living American vines in the 1860s. French vines, in contrast to most American vines, were very susceptible to the insect, which had evolved with the native American vine species and did not cause them appreciable damage. Phylloxera spread slowly but inexorably across the wine-growing regions of France, reaching the Champagne in 1890, and it eventually conquered all the major wine-growing regions of the world, with the exception of Chile. America provided the cure as well as the cause. American vines, the insects' Trojan horse, were not harmed by the insect, and could be used as rootstocks on which the susceptible European vine species Vitis vinifera could be grafted. This method was amazingly successful and continues to be used to keep the insect at bay. In hindsight the solution may seem obvious, but this book makes clear what an immense struggle was involved. Indeed, Campbell's book illustrates what a difficult, messy, and unpredictable business science can be, and what sheer hard work it is to translate scientific results into action......... Posted by: Erica Permalink Source Pereskia and the Origin of the Cactus Life-Form
We selected seven Pereskia species, representing both clades, and characterized their water relations by measuring a suite of physiological traits in wild populations. Additionally, we estimated basic climate parameters from collection localities for all 17 Pereskia species. Extant Pereskia species exhibit ecological water use patterns that are very similar to those of the leafless, stem-succulent cacti. Ancestral trait reconstruction for the physiological and environmental data provides a preliminary assessment of the ecology and water relations of the earliest cacti and suggests that several key elements of the cactus ecological niche were established before the evolution of the cactus life-form. We interpret these ecological traits as potentially important drivers of evolutionary innovation in the cacti......... Posted by: Erica Permalink Source Virtual 'forest' used to measure navigation skills
The study, conducted by researchers from the Lions Vision Center, Wilmer Eye Institute, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., involved varying the study participants' visual field of view and recording several performance measures such as walking time and path efficiency. Participants were then identified as either "good navigators" or "poor navigators." The results suggest that poor navigators rely on visual information to solve the task while good navigators are able to use visual information in conjunction with an internal representation of the environment. As a result of these differences, the performance of the poor navigators improved more than the performance of the good navigators as the amount of available visual information increased. "By simulating peripheral visual field losses during navigation, we were able to create a paradigm that systematically controls the amount of external visual information available to participants. This allows us to directly test the extent to which participants rely on this type of information, and identify those individuals who are able to rely on alternative sources of information to learn about their environments," said lead researcher Francesca Fortenbaugh, BS. "Knowing what types of information individuals use when navigating and how performance deteriorates when that information is removed is important not only for understanding human navigation in general, but also for the development of rehabilitation protocols for individuals with visual impairments"......... Posted by: Erica Permalink Source Invasive Species Harms Native Hardwoods By Killing Soil Fungus
An invasive weed that has spread across much of the U.S. harms native maples, ashes, and other hardwood trees by releasing chemicals harmful to a soil fungus the trees depend on for growth and survival, researchers report this week in the Public Library of Science. The tree-stifling alien, garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata), first introduced into the U.S. in the 1860s, has since spread to Canada and 30 states in the East and Midwest, with recent sightings as far west as Oregon. While a number of mechanisms -- from the absence of natural predators or parasites to the disruption of long-established interactions among native organisms -- have been proposed to explain the success of invasive species, this new work is the first to show that an invasive plant harms native plants by thwarting the biological "friends" upon which they depend for growth. The work, which provides striking evidence for a unique process by which invaders harm native species, was conducted by scientists at Harvard University, the University of Guelph, the University of Montana, Purdue University, and the UFZ Centre for Environmental Research in Gera number of. "While vanishing habitat caused by human activity is the number one threat to biodiversity, there is great concern over the impact of accidental and intentional dispersal of alien invasive species across the globe," says Kristina A. Stinson, a plant population biologist at the Harvard Forest, Harvard's ecology and conservation center in Petersham, Mass. "In North America, thousands of nonnative plants and animals have become established since European settlement and a number of more continue to be introduced. Some alien species cause little harm, while others can become very aggressive and radically transfigure their new habitat......... Posted by: Erica Permalink Source Healthy Backyard
Around the globe, more than half a billion people are celebrating the 36th annual Earth Day, and finding ways to make the world a greener place. So get involved! As the premier organization dedicated to conserving wildlife of every hue and stripe and speckle and spot, we invite you to join us in our commitment by practicing these Earth-friendly suggestions. Cheep cheep! Like the sounds of a backyard chorus? Visit http://www.wcs.org/birdgardening to find out how you can provide a friendly environment for the wild birds that share our city and suburbs. Garden for the bugs! Learn how planting flowers that will attract insects like earthworms, butterflies, and midge flies to your yard keeps it green and healthy. Visit for a list of bug bytes. Like a shore dinner? Learn how to choose seafood that comes from healthy, thriving fisheries by visiting http://www.wcs.org/gofish, where you can print out a seafood wallet card to carry with you. Reduce, reuse, recycle. With the continual growth of the "human footprint," or human influence, on the Earth's land surface, the world's resources are at stake. But nature is often resilient if given half a chance. By finding ways to tread more gently on the planet, and to co-exist with wildlife, we can help offer that chance......... Posted by: Kelly Permalink Source Diverse Tropical Forests
Tropical forest tree growth, distribution and mortality may be difficult to model. Credit: Photo: Christian Ziegler, STRI Archives.
As global change accelerates, quantifying the role of forests in the carbon cycle becomes ever more urgent. Modelers seek simple predictors of forest biomass and carbon flux. Over the last decade, the theory of metabolic ecology generated testable explanations, derived from physical and biochemical principles, for a wide range of ecological patterns. However, in two Ecology Letters articles, Helene Muller-Landau and his colleagues show that tree growth, mortality and abundance in fourteen tropical forests deviate substantially from metabolic ecology predictions, particularly for large trees. Instead, observed variation within and among forests supports alternative models presented by the CTFS team. Are tropical forest structure and dynamics too complex for universal explanations? "When you walk through different tropical forests, or graph data from different forests, there are certain features that, at first glance, look similar everywhere '" the presence of some very large trees, or the general shape of the tree size distribution curve," explains first author, Helene Muller-Landau from the University of Minnesota. "So you start to believe that there might be some general explanations. But the closer you look, the more differences you find '" differences that can'TMt be captured or even decently approximated by any single picture or formula."........ Posted by: Erica Permalink Source The Future Of Tropical Forest Species
Deforestation and habitat loss are widely expected to precipitate an extinction crisis among tropical forest species
Current human demographic trends, including slowing population growth and intense urbanization, give reason to hope that deforestation will slow, natural forest regeneration through secondary succession will accelerate, and the widely anticipated mass extinction of tropical forest species will be avoided. In the article "The future of tropical forest species" published online in Biotropica by STRI's S. Joseph and Helene Muller-Landau, the scientists show that the proportion of potential forest cover remaining is closely correlated with human population density among countries, in both the tropics and the temperate zone. Wright and Muller-Landau use United Nations population projections and continent-specific relationships between both total and rural population density and forest remaining today to project future tropical forest cover. "Our projections suggest that deforestation rates will decrease as population growth slows, and that a much larger area will continue to be forested than prior studies suggest"......... Posted by: Erica Permalink Source A hoverfly having a rest
A hoverfly having a rest. Picture of a hoverfly having a rest......... Posted by: Kelly Permalink Source |
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