October 2011

On September 25, the Friends of Historic Deerfield welcomed James Levitt to their annual meeting at the Flynt Center of Early New England Life. Levitt's presentation, Conservation in Massachusetts—Past, Present, and Future, identified current local and global conservation initiatives. The event was cosponsored by the New England Forestry Foundation. In a lively Q&A following the presentation, the audience discussed the

Harvard Forest researchers have nearly finished a major forest census begun in summer 2010 on a 35-hectare "mega-plot" on Prospect Hill. The mega-plot is part of a global array of plots to explore ecosystem processes, jointly established by CTFS and Harvard University's Arnold Arboretum and recently expanded by the Smithsonian Institution's Global Earth Observatory (SIGEO). Ecologist

A new paper by Harvard Forest Postdoc Sydne Record describes plant species associated with a regionally rare hemiparasitic plant, Swamp Lousewort (Pedicularis lanceolata), across its geographic range. Sydne performed this research as part of her dissertation work with Harvard Forest Senior Research Ecologist Aaron Ellison. See the full article published in Rhodora. 

Last month, Harvard Forest hosted its first Microbial Ecology Symposium, organized by Harvard Forest collaborator Serita Frey, a UNH biologist. The full day included talks and posters from senior scientists in the Harvard Forest LTER program (Stinson, Frey, Melillo, Ellison, Tang), as well as post-docs, graduate students and undergraduates (including a summer 2011 REU student). Topics included microbial responses to