Forest – Field Talk

Changing climate, changing landscape: monitoring the vast wilderness of interior Alaska

liza — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 19:17:43 +0000

Reds and golds of Fall. Broadleaf shrubs flame around the ever-green of conifers in the Toklat basin ecoregion of Denali National Park. Credit, Tim Rains, Denali National Park and Preserve, 2011.

National Park Service plant ecologist Carl Roland lives in Alaska, where climate change is palpably present. Ecologists have predicted major landscape-scale changes in the future of the Alaskan interior, with a potential shift from the iconic black and white spruce boreal forest, to broadleaf trees, or even grasslands, through a combination of heat, drought, insect outbreaks, and more frequent wildfires.

But predicting the future is not simple, not when you’re talking about landscapes as large and varied as the Alaskan Interior.

Carl and his colleagues in the Alaska National Park Service’s Inventory and Monitoring program have established ongoing ecosystem assessment across the Central Alaska Network encompassing Denali, Wrangell-Saint Elias, and Yukon-Charley Rivers National Parks and Preserves.

They have just published the first chunk of data in the February issue ESA’s journal Ecological Monographs, reporting a decade of data from Denali on the distribution and abundance of southcentral Alaska’s six tree species. They established over 1000 permanent sample sites spread across 1.28 million hectares of the north side of the park, hiking into remote locations, scrambling rocky slopes and wading mountain ponds to reach randomized plots. Carl tells Liza Lester why he thinks white spruce may expand higher up mountain slopes and into thawing tundra, while the cold-loving black spruce might lose ground. He describes his efforts to make National Park Service data more accessible, and makes a plea for the complementarity of academic and government science.

Click over to ESA’s blog, EcoTone, for more photos and experimental detail. Read more about the science of Denali’s changing landscape on the NPS Alaska Regional Office website.

Landscape-scale patterns in tree occupancy and abundance in subarctic Alaska. (2013) Carl Albert Roland, Joshua H. Schmidt, and E. Fleur Nicklen. Ecological Monographs 83(1):19-48.

Immersed in the clouds: Interview with tropical cloud forest researcher

liza — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 15:41:08 +0000

There is a world within the canopy of a tropical cloud forest that not many people get to see. In this unique ecosystem – maintained by the exceptionally wet microclimate of cloud cover—orchids, moss, lichens and other epiphytes grow in every crease and pocket of the supporting tree branches. Here, hundreds of species of birds, monkeys and other mammal pollinators navigate the aerial landscape, scattering seeds along the way (see below video).

Greg Goldsmith, tropical plant ecologist from the University of California, Berkeley, spends his days harnessed in this “canopy in the clouds”—the name of the interactive, educational website he is currently working on with photographer Drew Fulton and cinematographer Colin Witherill. Read more in the EcoTone post.

Photo Credit: Drew Fulton

The abandoned mutualist: When ants take their business elsewhere

liza — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:07:47 +0000

Ant-plant mutualisms are ubiquitous in tropical areas. In these examples of cooperation in nature, plants provide nutrition and shelter for ants that live on their leaves and branches. In return, the ants provide defense, kicking out (or even killing) any herbivores that try to eat the plant. The evolution of this relationship suggests that both species now need each other for survival. But Heraldo Vasconcelos of the University of Uberlandia in Brazil noticed something strange: in some populations of an ant-plant in the genus Tococa, plants lacked ant mutualists. Join us as he tells us about his paper in the September issue of Ecology, taking us on a trip into the Brazilian cerrado, where the plight of the antless ant-plants might not be so bad after all.

Battles of the sexes: Competition and evolution in tropical hummingbirds

liza — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:07:59 +0000

In this edition of Field Talk, we catch up with Ethan Temeles, a biologist at Amherst College, who tells us a tale of competition among the sexes in Caribbean hummingbirds – competition so severe that it drives their evolution. The short, straight bills of male purple-throated caribs and the long, curved bills of female caribs correspond to the shape of heliconia flowers on which they feed. The story got more complicated, though, when Dr. Temeles and his students discovered that despite their curved bills, females prefer straight flowers to curved ones. Join us as Dr. Temeles explains how this species’ sexual dimorphism evolved, and read more in his paper in the May issue of Ecology.

The Sacrificial Sibling Hypothesis

liza — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:00:13 +0000

The success of an animal or plant is determined by how many offspring it produces. But in some cases, not all offspring are created equal. In the February edition of Field Talk, Jaboury Ghazoul of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, describes how some species of trees invest resources in seeds that cannot produce viable offspring. His paper in the February issue of Ecology shows that when seed predators are abundant, investment in decoy seeds – or “sacrificial siblings” – can increase a plant’s chances of producing successful progeny.

Nonviable seed set enhances plant fitness: the sacrificial sibling hypothesis

Jaboury Ghazoul and Akiko Satake

Ecology 2009 90:2, 369-377