North America – Field Talk

Making room for prairie STRIPs: Lisa Schulte Moore (Land Sharing/Sparing #1)

liza — Tue, 19 Nov 2013 07:00:29 +0000

“I got kind of sick of working on environmental problems, and I wanted to work on environmental solutions. From that standpoint, agriculture — it’s like the world is your oyster. There’s so much that could be done.”

Lisa Schulte Moore, an professor of natural resource ecology and management at Iowa State University, seems to have the energy of three people. She has a hand in agricultural landscape management, bioenergy development, oak restoration, and hemlock and pine forest management, among other projects, and still makes time to drive all over Iowa, talking to farmers. In this episode of Field Talk, she explains how integrating STRIPs of prairie into conventional row crops improves water quality — and helps farms, waterways, and wildlife.

This is the first in a series of conversations springing from ideas and arguments about “land-sparing” and “land-sharing” strategies to conserve a rich tapestry of species in our human dominated world. Should we intensively farm some lands in order to preserve wildness in reserves? Accept a more flexible, less “pure,” idea of wildness, embracing conservation easements threaded into more diversified agricultural landscapes? Is this dichotomy a useful concept at all?

Soil erosion….or not. Even small amounts of perennials can have a dramatic impact on the environmental benefits provided by row-cropped agricultural lands. This image depicts the ability of native prairie to keep soil in farm fields, where it can produce crops, as opposed to allowing it to move into streams, where it becomes a serious pollutant. The STRIPS Project has shown that farm fields with just 10% of their area converted to native prairie produce diverse environmental benefits in amounts greatly disproportionate to their extent compared to fields entirely in row-crop production. This image was taken after a 4 inch rain. Caption, Lisa Schulte Moore. Photo, Dave Williams.

Show notes:

[0:00] song of the dickcissel (Spiza Americana), recorded by Jonathon Jongsma at Dordt College Prairie, in Sioux, Iowa in July, 2013. Background birds: red-winged blackbird, common yellowthroat, American crow, American robin.
[3:20] Lisa Schulte Moore’s Lab
[5:30] “If you’re working in agriculture, it’s going to be all about privately owned landscapes. If you want anything to stick, it’s gotta work for the people that own and manage that private land. It means working with farmers, and the people who talk to farmers.”
[10:10] farm policy, risk management and unintended consequences: the Energy Independence and Security Act (2007)
[12:28] the four big water pollutants in Iowa, nitrogen, phosphorus, sediment, and bacterial contamination, cause problems near and far.
[13:22] Science-based Trials of Rowcrops Integrated with Prairies (STRIPs) at the Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge
[14:30] four experimental treatments in the STRIPs pilot project
[23:30] birds: we can pack in more territories for dickcissels and common yellowthroats when strips are interlaced into the rowcrops than if the same amount of prairie is placed at the base of a field.
[27:17] stage II: putting STRIPs into working farms (pdf) – an abundance of volunteers
[31:26] Should agricultural policies encourage land sparing or wildlife-friendly farming? (2008) Joern Fischer, Berry Brosi, Gretchen C Daily, Paul R Ehrlich, Rebecca Goldman, Joshua Goldstein, David B Lindenmayer, Adrian D Manning, Harold A Mooney, Liba Pejchar, Jai Ranganathan, and Heather Tallis. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6:7, 380-385.
[34:45] “Right now, probably the top concern in the agricultural realm itself is that soil fertility piece. How do we maintain soil quality into the future?” Natural Resources Conservation Service (USDA-NRCS) campaign on soil quality.
[39:50] “What’s going to work in this place, for this farmer?”

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.

Tallgrass prairie: the invasion of the woody shrubs

liza — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 18:04:08 +0000

Kansas native Jesse Nippert loves the prairie. He spends much of his time immersed in the tall grass as an assistant professor at Kansas State University. Though agriculture has vastly changed the plains of North America, pockets of tall grass remain on rangeland and preserves. But the remaining tallgrass prairie, like grasslands all over the world, is changing as well, becoming, in many places, scrubland. The change is a problem for ranchers and an absorbing mystery for grassland ecologists. Jesse explains indications of positive feedbacks promoting the creeping spread of woody shrubs into the tallgrass prairie, from his paper in the November edition of Ecosphere, ESA’s new online-only, open-access journal.

Learn more about tallgrass prairie, C4 grasses, and the Konza Long Term Ecological Research site in the accompanying post on ESA’s blog, Ecotone.

Stepping stones of diversity: the Santa Barbara landscape and giant kelp genetics

liza — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:06:00 +0000

What is it about the rocky habitat in California that makes giant kelp so prevalent? And how do they spread from one section of the Santa Barbara Channel to another? According to Filipe Alberto, a marine population geneticist at the Centre for Marine Sciences in Portugal, giant kelp spread from one area to another in a stepping stone fashion, changing their genetic make-up as they go along. In his study, published in the January issue of Ecology, Filipe and colleagues analyzed the effects of isolation on genetic diversity between kelp forests. Diving with researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, Filipe collected all the samples he needed to study their genetic diversity—and he did it in just two weeks at the coastal Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) site in Conception, California. The samples, which were then shipped back to Portugal, showed that habitat continuity plays an important role in genetic connectivity.

How Rocky Mountain lakes fight back against pollution

liza — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:59:46 +0000

Leora Nanus of the USGS Water Resources Division joins us in the June edition of Field Talk. Nanus studied the ability of alpine lakes in the national parks of the Rocky Mountains to buffer against harmful acidic pollution from the air. She and her colleagues found that some surprising lake characteristics, like surrounding slope steepness, lake elevation and bedrock minerals, can be used to predict the resilience of a lake to pollution. Nanus used her data to create a model for national park managers that can help determine which lakes are at highest risk of the negative impacts of pollution.

Seasonality and climate change

liza — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:29:22 +0000

Rising temperatures as a result of climate change promise to alter the behaviors of temperature-sensitive organisms. But climate change is also affecting the timing of seasons, which can throw off the alarm clock for critical behaviors, such as breeding. In this edition of Field Talk, we speak with Shaye Wolf, a biologist at the Center for Biological Diversity in San Francisco. Her research, published in the March issue of Ecology, tracks the reproductive behaviors of a small seabird, Cassin’s Auklet, on islands from Alaska to Mexico. She explains that climate change affects different populations in different ways, but could have dire consequences for those that rely heavily on consistent seasonality.

Lizard Evolution and the Ants In Your Pants Dance

liza — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 22:29:52 +0000

Invasive red fire ants from South America have become a major pest in southwestern U.S., bringing their stinging venom and crop-destroying ways. In this edition of Field Talk, we catch up with Tracy Langkilde, assistant professor of biology at Penn State University, who studies one of the ants’ seemingly unlikely targets: eastern fence lizards. The lizards have evolved a novel twitching response that flicks attacking ants off their bodies. But in her paper in the January issue of Ecology, Dr. Langkilde explains that since native ants don’t normally attack lizards, this behavior must have evolved in a very short time.

Invasive fire ants alter behavior and morphology of native lizards

Tracy Langkilde

Ecology 2009 90:1, 208-217

Candy canes as plant defenses

liza — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 21:47:15 +0000

What would make a plant want to stop growing towards the sun and instead grow downward? Michael Wise of the University of Virginia studies a species of goldenrod that grows toward the ground for part of the spring months, creating a morphology that looks a lot like a candy cane. He explains that this “candy-cane” morphology could increase the plant’s defenses against herbivores. The origin and evolution of such a defense, however, is a mystery when so few plants disguise themselves by this morphology, which he likens to an animal ducking to escape a threat. Read more about Wise’s research in the December issue of Ecology (www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/08-0277.1).

Dead Zones as Safe Havens

liza — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:39:18 +0000

Andrew Altieri, a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University, joins us in this month’s episode of Field Talk to discuss his work examining hypoxic marine systems, known as dead zones. Altieri studies a community of clams and mussels – collectively known as bivalves – in Narragansett Bay, off the coast of Providence, Rhode Island. His paper in the October issue of Ecology shows that one species of bivalve, the quahog, can benefit from reduced oxygen content in the water. The resulting boom in quahog populations has important implications for ecosystem services.

Biocontrol Insects and the Mammals Who Love Them

liza — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:44:01 +0000

Managing biological invasions is one of ecology’s most difficult challenges. One controversial approach is the use of biocontrol agents, which involves transplanting an invasive’s natural enemies in an effort to control its spread. In this episode of Field Talk, Dean Pearson, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service, talks about a grassland community in western Montana where a biocontrol insect has been introduced to control an invasive weed. His paper in the September issue of Ecological Applications shows that even the most carefully selected biocontrol agents can have complex and detrimental indirect effects on the community.