Author: harvardforest

HF Scientists Featured in "Poetry in America" Course for Teachers

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This spring, 194 K-12 teachers from around the nation enrolled in an online course featuring three Harvard Forest ecologists discussing poems related to their research. The online course is part of the Poetry in America project, created and directed by Harvard professor Elisa New — a public television series and multi-platform digital initiative that brings poetry into classrooms and living rooms around the world.

Featured scientists were interviewed in the field, reading poems aloud and connecting specific themes and vocabulary to their own ecological research. Senior Scientist and Site Forester Audrey Barker Plotkin read the poem “The Oak Tree at the Entrance to Blackwater Pond,” by Mary Oliver. Longtime research collaborator Serita Frey, a microbial ecologist at the University of New Hampshire, read “Mushrooms” by Sylvia Plath and “Weakness and Doubt” by Kay Ryan. Noah Charney, a recent Harvard Forest Bullard Fellow, read “The Pond” by Gregory Orr.

The project’s public television series, Poetry in America (presented by WGBH Boston and distributed by American Public Television), has been broadcast nationwide. The project’s for-credit and professional development courses are offered in partnership with Harvard University and enroll undergraduates, graduate students, and educators.

New Grant: Gypsy Moth, Carbon Storage, and Tree Mortality

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A Harvard Forest-led research team has received a $99,000 Rapid Response Research grant from the National Science Foundation to study the factors underlying widespread oak tree mortality across southern New England in the wake of an ongoing, multi-year outbreak of invasive gypsy moth. 

It has been more than thirty years since gypsy moth has caused such a high level of tree defoliation and mortality in eastern North America. Not all trees have succumbed during the 4-year outbreak, however, leading the research team to question what actually controls tree mortality during a major defoliation event.

In spring, trees create new leaves by drawing on stored starches and sugars. When caterpillars defoliate a tree several years in a row, the research team posits, the tree may become resource-starved. Their research proposasl asks: is there a critical threshold of resource (carbon) starvation beyond which a tree cannot recover?

To answer this question, the researchers established a network of plots in oak forests that experienced differing severities of gypsy moth activity in 2018. This year, they are collecting small wood samples from the stems and roots of oak trees in those plots, to study the relationship between stored carbon resources and tree mortality.

The research team is made up of several Harvard Forest senior scientists – Jonathan Thompson, Audrey Barker Plotkin, and David Orwig – with HF research assisant Danelle LaFlower, Harvard University graduate student Meghan Blumstein, and UMass-Amherst professor Joseph Elkinton.

2019-2020 Bullard Fellows Announced

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We are pleased to announce the Harvard Forest Charles Bullard Fellows for 2019-2020. The mission of the Bullard Fellowship Program is to support advanced research and study by individuals who show promise of making an important contribution–either as scholars or administrators–to forestry and forest-related subjects, from biology to earth sciences, economics, politics, law, and the arts and humanities.

FELLOW INSTITUTION RESEARCH AREA

Kristen DeAngelis

University of Massachusetts–Amherst

 Effects of chronic warming on the spore-forming filamentous bacteria Actinomycetes
Jean-Claude Gegout AgroParisTech — Paris Institute of Technology for Life, Food and Environmental Sciences Impact of global change on the growth of temperate herbaceous plants (comparing herbarium and contemporary specimens)
Hannah Gosnell Oregon State University  Transferring lessons from the New England Landscape Futures Project to the Andrews Forest LTER Program in Oregon
Matts Lindbladh Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences Book project: forest history of southern Sweden
Anna Sala University of Montana Plant physiological ecology
Anne Short Gianotti Boston University Investigation of the processes that drive wildlife management and conservation decisions in suburban and urban areas

Browse highlights of recent Bullard Fellows: 

Bullard Spotlight: Tom Sherry on the Evolution of Bird Communities

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Charles Bullard Fellow Thomas Sherry, who studies terrestrial bird migration, community structure, and conservation at Tulane University in New Orleans, used his six-month residency at the Forest to begin a book on the co-evolution and community-driven specialization of tropical birds and insects.

His unique integration of evolutionary approaches with ecological processes like predator-prey interactions and interspecific competition has led to new insights into the organization of tropical communities. This approach looks to the deeper evolutionary origins of questions that ecologists typically ask about communities.

Although Sherry’s focus has been on the tropics, one chapter of his forthcoming book explores insights into how tropical evolution of specialization indirectly contributed to the adaptive radiation of New World wood warblers, which dominate the abundance, diversity, and ecosystem services of birds in New England forests.

pen-and-ink drawing of a small bird perched on a branch with a grasshopper in its beak

Sherry says the attraction of Harvard Forest for this fellowship was a quiet retreat away from home-institution responsibilities, ready access to a variety of experts both in Cambridge and the Harvard Forest, and a full seminar schedule to think more broadly about forest ecology. He also used the fellowship as a platform to interact with plant biologists and ecologists, to explore possible parallels between bird-insect co-evolution and plant-herbivore co-evolution, as well as mechanisms of tropical tree coexistence. During his fellowship, he gave seminars at Harvard Forest, University of Utah, Cornell, and the University of Connecticut to test his ideas and get valuable feedback.

(The pen-and-ink drawings here – important biological illustrations for Sherry’s Bullard project – were done by Meg Maurer, a Tulane University senior undergraduate, in consultation with Sherry throughout his residency at Harvard Forest. These and six other drawings will serve as a memorial to this extremely gifted student, who unfortunately was killed in an accident in March 2019.)

Study: Land Conservation Boosts Local Economies

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Land conservation modestly increases employment rates, a traditional indicator of economic growth, according to a new study of New England cities and towns, led by scientists at Harvard Forest, Amherst College, Highstead, and Boston University.

The study, published in Conservation Biology, is the first of its kind, estimating the local net impacts of both private and public land conservation over 25 years (1990-2015) across 1500 cities and towns that are home to 99.97% of New England’s population.

The study shows that when land protection increased, employment increased over the next five-year period, even when controlling rigorously for other associated factors. “Employment gains were modest but significant across the region, and the effect was amplified in more rural areas,” says Kate Sims, Chair of the Economics Department at Amherst College and a co-lead author of the study. To illustrate the study’s results, she explained that if a town with 50,000 people employed increased its land protection by 50%, it saw, on average, 750 additional people employed in the next five years. 

Conservation – the permanent protection of land from developed uses – has long been viewed by skeptics as a loss of possible local tax revenue from new development or resource extraction, and thus painted as incompatible with economic growth. Proponents of land protection point to the fact that conservation can reduce the cost of community services, while providing both indirect economic benefits – such as clean water and flood protection – and direct economic gains such as increased real estate and amenity values and inputs to the forest and farm products industry.

Prior studies have mainly focused on the impacts of public land conservation such as national parks, and in the Western U.S. The current study builds on analyses by Harvard Forest and Highstead to track and learn from the unique framework of land protection efforts in New England, which include large amounts of privately-owned land.

a logging forwarder parked next to a stack of logs

The authors say gains in employment following increases in conservation may be driven by new jobs in tourism and recreation—a sector that provides 52 billion dollars a year in direct spending, according to estimates by the Outdoor Industry Association. The authors also point to the preservation of jobs in areas with commercial timberlands that support timber harvests, non-timber forest products such as maple syrup, and public access and recreational activities.

The scientists saw small gains in median household income, overall population, and employment in recreation, tourism, and arts-based industries as a result of land conservation, though the effects were not statistically significant. They saw no change in the number of new building permits when conservation increased, suggesting that protecting land does not reduce housing development, but redirects where it occurs.

Today, about a quarter of New England’s land base is permanently conserved. “More than half of the region’s conservation has occurred within the last 25 years,” says Spencer Meyer, Senior Conservationist at Highstead and a co-author of the study. “We now have further evidence that conservation generally boosts, rather than depresses, local economies through job growth.”

“New England is unique,” says Jonathan Thompson, Senior Ecologist at Harvard Forest and co-lead author of the study. “Most of its land is privately owned by hundreds of thousands of individual landowners. We’ve now shown that when private landowners protect their land, the benefits extend beyond nature and into their communities, too.”

“The benefits of land conservation provide all kinds of ecosystem services, from recreation to water purification,” says Doug Levey, a program director for the National Science Foundation, which funded the study through its Long-Term Ecological Research program.

The team notes that more research, especially on property values and tax revenues, is needed to get a more complete picture of the costs and benefits of land conservation.

(Photos by: New England Mountain Bike Association (top), Spencer Meyer (bottom)) 

Harvard Forest Ecology Symposium to Celebrate 30 Years of LTER Research

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On March 19, 2019, the Harvard Forest will live-stream its annual Ecology Symposium, with a special look back on the history of the Harvard Forest Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program as we move into its fourth decade. Talks and panel discussions will feature lead investigators from the first decade of LTER that began in the 1980s – including John Aber, Emery Boose, David Foster, Jerry Melillo, Knute Nadelhoffer, Tim Sipe, and Steve Wofsy – and current investigators, to highlight key insights, outcomes, and future research plans.

In February, the Forest received its largest-ever grant from the National Science Foundation, to fund its next 6 years as an LTER site with leadership by HF Senior Ecologist Jonathan Thompson. Uniformly positive responses from reviewers celebrated the many interconnected dimensions of research in the proposal and the Forest’s affiliated education and outreach programs, including work with conservation stakeholders and education programs for students from local K-12 schools, Harvard, and universities around the world.

Study: Decades of Tree Rings Extend Today's High-Tech Climate Stories

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Satellite imagery, carbon dioxide measurements, and computer models all help scientists understand how climate and carbon dynamics are changing in the world’s forests. But the technology powering these high-tech data only stretches back about thirty years, limiting our picture of long-term change.

A new study in Nature Communications co-authored by HF Senior Ecologist Neil Pederson with scientists from Columbia University, ETH Zürich, and elsewhere shows how information revealed by a new method of analyzing tree rings matches the story told by more high-tech equipment over the short-term. Because trees are long-lived, looking back in their rings with this new approach may add decades or even centuries to our understanding of carbon storage and climate change in forests.

To test whether tree rings are a good proxy for satellite and other data, the scientists examined ring samples from two widespread tree species — tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera) and northern red oak (Quercus rubra) – growing in three climatically different regions of the eastern US.

By analyzing the carbon and oxygen molecules (stable isotopes) stored in the rings, they could compare the trees’ own picture of forest productivity to estimates derived from satellites. They found strong agreement each year, and over time.

The tree rings also revealed that the biggest changes in annual forest growth were linked to moisture availability, regardless of climate. “Our method showed that the productivity of a forest can be estimated using information from just five trees,” says Laia Andreu Hayles, an Associate Research Professor at the Tree-Ring Laboratory of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and co-author of the new study. “The stable isotopes measured in tree rings are highly sensitive to tracking moisture.”

The team says the full power of this new method would rely on an expanded network of tree ring research. “When we put tree ring data to work in historical climate models, we find that the models are more powerful when more species are included,” says Neil Pederson, Harvard Forest Senior Ecologist. “I suspect this might also be the case when we use models to look forward, to future forest productivity and carbon storage.”

Photographs

(Click photos to access high-resolution image for media sharing. Please include captions and credits when sharing.)

A green leaf

A leaf of tulip-poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera), the tallest documented tree in the eastern US. Fast-growing and productive, this species is important for both forest products and the carbon cycle. Photos: Neil Pederson

A flower of tulip-poplar

A flower of tulip-poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera), the tallest documented tree in the eastern US. Fast-growing and productive, this species is important for both forest products and the carbon cycle. Photos: Neil Pederson

Two researchers measure one tree while a third researcher measures another tree

Sampling tulip-poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera) at the Black Rock Forest in southern NY State. Left->Right: Javier Martin Fernandez, Dr. Laia Andreu Hayles, and Ana Camila Gonzalez. Photo: Neil Pederson

Microscopic scan showing the rings and wood structure of a tree

Scan of the rings and wood structure of one of the tulip-poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera) samples used in this study. Image: Mathieu Levesque

A researcher taking a core sample from an oak tree

Dr. Laia Andreu Hayles of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory coring a northern red oak (Quercus rubra) at the Black Rock Forest in southern NY State. Photo: Neil Pederson

Scientific equipment in a laboratory

System used to extract carbon and oxygen isotopes from the annual rings of trees. Photo: Mathieu Levesque

Museum Event to Discuss Dam Removal in New England

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More than ten thousand dams were built on New England rivers over the past four centuries. In the past twenty years, intentional removal of these structures has become common throughout the region, motivated by public safety, maintenance costs, and the desire to restore passage for migratory fish.

Scientist Noah Snyder, Harvard Forest Bullard Fellow and Associate Professor at Boston College, will join us in the Fisher Museum on Wednesday, March 27 at 7:00 p.m., to review the history of dam construction and removal in our region, and describe results from a ten-year study following the removal of the Merrimack Village Dam on the Souhegan River in New Hampshire, one of the best-studied dam sites in the country. Snyder’s presentation will also touch on a few local examples and close with lessons learned about sediment management following dam removal that apply to stream restoration projects throughout our region.

The event is free and open to the public.

Harvard Forest Map Collection Digitized for Public Use

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A partnership with Massachusetts Digital Commonwealth has led to the digitization of 600+ maps from the Harvard Forest Archive: local property maps, forest inventories, detailed maps of damage from the 1938 Hurricane, even winter range maps of local snowshoe hares! All the maps are free for download and use under a Creative Commons license.

Improvements to Harvard Farm Include Public Art Sculpture

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Travelers on Route 32 in Petersham will soon see improvements to the Harvard Farm, formerly the Petersham Country Club property, now a working cow pasture, ecological research site, and outdoor classroom owned by the Harvard Forest.

Some changes are small and aesthetic: the Harvard Forest Woods Crew has been clearing brush and pruning dead tree branches to beautify the view from the road. This spring, the large equipment shed will be painted and upgraded to match the style and color of the historic saltbox-style clubhouse building.

Interpretive signage will be installed to explain the Forest’s ongoing ecological research at the farm, which includes studies of how the timing and intensity of grazing and haying affects plants, soils, carbon, water, and wildlife, especially birds, small mammals and butterflies. The cows on the site are owned by local farmers, who use the land free of charge while the Forest maintains the fences. Each year, hundreds of students learn from research at the Farm.

The most prominent change to the roadside view will be a new art exhibit – a 5-ton sculpture to be installed in mid-December following a 6-week stint at Harvard University’s Science Center Plaza in Cambridge, Mass. The exhibit, called “Warming Warning,” depicts global temperature data and shows several potential futures of carbon dioxide emissions – aiming to spark conversations about local actions that can be taken now to combat climate change. It was built from wood harvested and milled by the Harvard Forest Woods Crew, and framed by a local timber framer.

The sculpture will be installed in an opening on the road that is left by the removal of a 1920’s era, Cape-style house that fell into significant disrepair in the years before the Country Club sold the property to the Forest. The demolition of the house building will begin in mid-December, and should be complete within a few days.

“The Forest has a commitment to restoring and maintaining historic buildings,” says Clarisse Hart, Outreach and Education Director for the Forest, noting the Forest’s renovation of the Bryant Farmhouse on Pierce Road in 2008. “But the Cape’s basement has been flooded for years and its foundation is crumbling. We need to focus on maintaining the farm property as a conserved working landscape for research and education, and a resource for the community.”

The Farm landscape is readily viewed from the adjoining Town footpaths on Poor Farm Road near the Curling Club and Pierce Road next to the Bryant House. Parking is available at both sites. Hart adds, “We’d also like the community to know that through the winter the sledding hill downslope of the Curling Club parking area will remain open to the public.” During the rest of the year, all of the fenced areas hold cows.

Study: Recent Land-Use Trends Limit Carbon Potential

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Over the next 50 years, land-use change in New England (both forest harvest and land development) will have more of an impact on forest dynamics than climate change.

And, if recent trends in regional land use are maintained, the landscape will fall far short of its potential to store carbon, explains a new paper in the journal Global Environmental Change, by HF Research Associate Matthew Duveneck and HF Senior Ecologist Jonathan Thompson.