Author: harvardforest

January Interns Create Multimedia Projects for Conservation Community

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Since 2015, Harvard Forest has hosted a Harvard undergraduate intern for 3 weeks each January, in partnership with the Harvard Office of Career Services’ Museum and Arts Fellowship program.

This year, the Forest hired three interns to work on a range of multimedia projects for the Wildlands and Woodlands initiative, highlighting the role of universities in land conservation across New England, including a conservation story map and a podcast episode.

The interns (Angelica Torres, Julian Rauter, and Amy Li) joined Harvard Divinity School student Alexa Rice, who is completing a Field Education Placement with the Forest this semester, to explore the landscape on field walks (one pictured here) during their three week fellowship.

New Study Makes 52 Million Tree Records More Accessible to Science

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The world’s primary archive of tree ring data, which holds more than 52 million cost-free records spanning 8,000 years of history, has gotten a makeover by scientists from four countries committed to making science more accessible.

The co-authors report in the Journal of Biogeography that the International Tree‐Ring Data Bank, developed in 1974 and populated by hundreds of contributing scientists and agencies, had only been used for a handful of studies at a global scale due to inconsistent data accessibility and formatting.

“The Data Bank is a fantastic resource for earth sciences that has been scarcely used,” says Rubén Manzanedo, a post-doctoral research fellow at Harvard Forest and the University of Washington, who co-led the project with Shoudong Zhao from Beijing Normal University, a visiting student fellow at the Forest in 2017, and Neil Pederson, a senior ecologist at the Forest. “This new version is more accessible to scientists outside dendrochronology, and also gives an ecological context to interpret results drawn from it.” 

The team corrected thousands of formatting issues that prevented files from being read, requiring scientists to either manually correct errors or omit large portions of available data. “The data correction took weeks of intensive work,” says Manzanedo. “In the sample records, any misplaced character or erroneous empty space would make a whole file unreadable. Finding those was sometimes like finding a needle in a haystack. We kept a log with our decisions to ensure the future traceability of the process.”

The most vital feature in the team’s improvements is a new tool that helps scientists reduce the analytical bias that comes from the Data Bank’s overrepresentation of samples from certain geographic areas, environmental conditions, and species groups.

“Five tree species represent 30 percent of the Data Bank’s records,” says Manzanedo. 81 percent of the records are from conifers, which are not the dominant tree in many ecosystems. Manzanedo explains: “Global results previously drawn from the database would likely reflect the response of conifers, and not the trees here in the temperate zone of the eastern US or in east Asia, and certainly not the trees in the tropics.”

The authors hope their work can be applied to other scientific databases. Manzanedo adds, “We hope these new tools promote a more pro-active approach to fixing the gaps in large ecological databases and encourage people to keep improving the Tree Ring Data Bank, but even more importantly, that it encourages a wider range of scientists to use the valuable data we already have.”

16 Giant Viruses New to Science Unexpectedly Found in Harvard Forest Soils

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A study released today in Nature Communications by biologists at the University of Massachusetts, the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute (JGI), and Stanford University reports on the discovery of 16 giant viruses never before seen by science, all found in one small soil sample in the woods at Harvard Forest.

The soil sample – a tiny amount that could fit into a thimble – was collected in May 2017 from the Barre Woods soil warming experiment, a long-term climate study where scientists have been heating up the soils 5 degrees Celsius, year-round, since 2002.

The discovery was accidental. The researchers were actually looking for bacteria, to understand how microbial communities are changing in response to warming temperatures.

A sign marks a research plot in the woods. Small flags of various colors rise out of the leaf litter on the forest floor. Outside of the plot there is snow on the ground.
Barre Woods Soil Warming Plot

Co-lead author of the study, Lauren Alteio, a PhD candidate at UMass, explained that while working with Frederik Schulz during her fellowship at the JGI, they discovered the viruses using a sequencing approach called mini-metagenomics, which until now has only been applied in aquatic environments.

Alteio says the new method may help them discover more in future samples. “Soil is immensely diverse,” she notes, “and we are only beginning to scratch the surface of the organisms and viruses that inhabit it.” This study marks the first discovery of giant viruses from a terrestrial environment.

Jeff Blanchard, UMass biology professor and longtime Harvard Forest research affiliate who oversaw the work, says the massive genomes of the giant viruses stood out next to surrounding organisms as if they were Macy’s day parade balloons. Several of the new viruses found by the team have the largest virus genomes ever recorded.

The scientists gave the new viruses names that reflect their forest origins, such as “Dasovirus” (Greek “daso” for forest), and “Solumvirus” (Latin “solum” for soil). They also propose naming one “Harvfovirus” to honor Harvard Forest.

The study was funded by the US Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

(Title photo, a micrograph of Cafeteria roenbergensis virus — CroV, the closest relative of the Faunuvirus discovered at Harvard Forest — by Ulrike Mersdorf & Matthias Fischer at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research.)

Applications Open: Mid-Career Fellowship Program

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Note: Applications are now closed.

The Charles Bullard Fellowship program supports 6 to 12 months of advanced research and study by individuals who show promise of making an important contribution, either as scholars or administrators, to forest-related subjects including biology, earth sciences, conservation, economics, politics, humanities, the arts, or law.

Applications for 2019-2020 are open through January 15, 2019.

  • Explore topics studied by current and past Bullard Fellows.

Public Exhibits Merge Data, Science Communication, & Design

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Two art exhibits on view now at Harvard Forest and Harvard University are bringing pressing science issues to the fore and promoting public discussions about future change.

Both exhibits were co-created in a unique collaboration by 2016-2017 Bullard Fellow David Buckley Borden and HF Senior Ecologist Aaron Ellison.

Hemlock Hospice is an 18-piece sculpture exhibit embedded in a long-term research area at Harvard Forest, meant to immerse audiences in the story of pest invasion and decline in eastern hemlock forests across the eastern seaboard. The exhibit will be on view for public exploration through November 18, 2018.

The exhibit has been featured widely in the media and is the subject of a short documentary created by Faizal Wetscot, Devin Chaganis, and Casey Keenan, debuted at a public event in the Fisher Museum on October 6, 2018.

Warming Warning, on view in Harvard’s Science Center Plaza through December 7, 2018, is a 5-ton sculpture made of timbers sustainably harvested and milled at the Harvard Forest. It depicts global data on more than a century of rising temperatures, and poses several potential future temperature scenarios based on climate action we take today. 

Bullard Spotlight: Noah Charney on What Shapes a Landscape

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Bullard Fellow Noah Charney spent his year-long fellowship at the Forest working on a book to engage general audiences with multi-layered stories of nature. Centered around photographs of real field sites, the book weaves personal narratives together with the clues visible in the images to reconstruct underlying ecological processes. His intention is for readers to think about how geology, soils, climate, plants, animals, and humans all coalesce to shape a landscape. The narratives will also explore local challenges to conservation and human relationships to nature.

The project reflects Charney’s multidisciplinary work teaching natural history, directing a conservation nonprofit, authoring nature guides and publishing basic research on wildlife ecology, evolution and climate change.  

Charney describes Harvard Forest as the ideal platform for writing this book, given its emphasis on understanding how modern landscape ecologies are shaped by the past, as well as its collaborative community of field-based scholars working at the interface of academia and applied conservation. While writing the book in residence at the Forest, Charney says, he regularly integrated ideas from HF seminars, colleagues, and ongoing initiatives like Wildlands and Woodlands.  

Museum Event: How Past Disasters Can Inform Climate Action

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For thousands of years, humans have faced environmental challenges – floods, wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes, and more. On September 25 in the Fisher Museum, Colorado-based geologist and science educator Lisa Gardiner will show how lessons from past disasters can help us face climate change–an issue she calls “the catastrophe of our time.”

Gardiner’s new book, Tales from an Uncertain World: What Other Assorted Disasters Can Teach Us About Climate Change, published this year by the University of Iowa Press, explores a history of human reactions to fast and slow environmental change, from flash floods to species invasions and eroding coastlines.

“One of the things I really love to do is understand how history and science and human behavior and psychology come together,” says Gardiner. “Any environmental story is a combination of how the Earth was acting, how people reacted, and how someone documented all of that.”  

For 15 years, Gardiner has created educational experiences about weather, climate, and Earth systems for websites, museums, and classrooms as an educator at the UCAR Center for Science Education, an affiliate of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. She is the illustrator of NASA’s Elementary GLOBE series of storybooks about the environment, has been a Smithsonian Scholar visiting underserved schools in Louisiana, and has contributed to many public exhibits about climate change, weather, and air quality. Before her education career, Gardiner earned a PhD studying how clams and snails on the sea floor formed communities amidst changes in climate and sea level about 120,000 years ago.

She points to her background as a climate science educator as fuel for the book project. “I would see people getting really depressed or scared or angry,” Gardiner explains. “They’re natural emotions, but they don’t help us get out of a mess.”

Gardiner hopes her book will empower readers to act. “Yes, the whole earth is changing,” she says, “and we have caused that. But it’s individual decisions that add up to what we’re going to do about it.”

She says she is glad to bring this book presentation to the Fisher Museum, which focuses on change over time in the local landscape. She points out, “In New England, today we can clearly see the impacts of so many trees being cut down during the colonial period. But at the time, you know, you were just heating your house. The examples in the book show environmental change at these really human, individual scales.”

The event begins at 7:00 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

'Weathering Change' Features Poetry by Senior Ecologist

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A new compilation of poetry and art called Weathering Change, published by the Harvard Office for Sustainability, features reflections on climate change by 21 members of the Harvard community, including an introduction to the volume and poems by HF Senior Ecologist Aaron Ellison.

Ellison published his own volume of poetry in 2017 after time as a visiting writer at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon.

New Report Voices Local Views of the Future Landscape

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A new report released today by the Harvard Forest and the Science Policy Exchange, with support from Highstead and the Wildlands & Woodlands initiative, provides a stakeholder-driven approach for addressing the important question: What does the future hold for the New England landscape?

Voices from the Land: Listening to New Englanders’ Views of the Future summarizes the perspectives of 169 New Englanders (gathered through interviews and workshops in each state) on future land development, conservation, agriculture, and timber harvest.

Interviewees showed a powerful attachment to the New England landscape and urgent concerns about whether current conservation and land-use planning activities are enough to keep pace with increasing development pressure, forest fragmentation, extreme weather, and changing economic pressures on landowners.

Commonalities in the stakeholders’ narratives formed the basis for 4 scenarios of future land use in New England, which are described in detail in the report. The scenarios provided parameters for a complex computer model — developed at the Harvard Forest in Senior Ecologist Jonathan Thompson‘s lab — analyzing 4 possible outcomes for land cover in New England through 2060.

Major support for this project was provided by three grants from the National Science Foundation (including the S3 RCN and Harvard Forest Long-Term Ecological Research Program), and Highstead.

  • Download the report.
  • Explore more research investigating the future of the New England landscape via HF Senior Ecologist Jonathan Thompson’s lab.
  • Request a print copy (a limited number is available) by emailing Lucy Lee at lucylee@fas.harvard.edu.

Bullard Spotlight: Crystal Schaaf on Visualizing Hemlock Loss

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2017-2018 Bullard Fellow Crystal Schaaf, a Professor in the School for the Environment at the University of Massachusetts Boston, spent her sabbatical year at Harvard Forest documenting the changes in forest structure that are occurring due to the widespread hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA) infestation of eastern forests. Professor Schaaf and her team employ satellite imagery and terrestrial lidar scans of a forest to map structural change and assess forest health.

While satellite and airborne observations of a forest provide landscape-scale information about the upper canopy, lidar scans from under the canopy provide crucial information on the pest-induced dieback of hemlock needles and branches. Lidar may also be able to capture the regrowth of understory deciduous saplings as they respond to the additional light filtering through the thinning upper canopy.

“By living onsite, we had a wonderful base of operations to store our lidars and field equipment, gain immediate access to Harvard Forest, and collaborate with an amazing group of researchers,” says Schaaf. The data she and her team collected will be used for a doctoral dissertation (UMass Boston graduate student Peter Boucher) and a number of journal articles.

At the start of her fellowship at the Forest, Professor Schaaf also co-hosted a large international workshop on the use of terrestrial scanning lidars to assess forest biomass.

(Lidar scan image of an adelgid-infested hemlock stand, courtesy of Crystal Schaaf)

Study Reveals 14,000 Years of Change in New England's Forests

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New analyses of lake‐sediment pollen records from 29 sites across southern and central New England, recently published in the Journal of Biogeography, report on fourteen thousand years of changes in tree diversity since the last glaciation.

To track these changes, the research team started with pollen grains collected in sediments deep beneath lakes and ponds across the region. Paired with regional paleo-climate data (showing major shifts in temperature and precipitation), known differences in topography and soils, and the environmental niches of different tree species, they created maps of how forest diversity shifted at 1,000-year intervals in response to climate and other variables.

According to the study, until about 12,000 years ago, the post-glacial landscape had none of the variation we see across New England today. The forests were boreal – dominated by spruce and jack pine – a forest type today found mainly in northern New England and Canada.

As climate warmed over the 2,000 years that followed, the boreal forest was replaced by white pine – and then diversity diverged even further in southern New England and along coasts, to include oak and pitch pine.

With more warming and increased precipitation between 9,000 and 8,000 years ago, forest composition shifted again. Hemlock‐birch‐beech and oak‐beech forest types replaced white pine, and oaks began to dominate in southern New England — creating a spatial pattern similar to that of the present day.

The study also analyzed phenomena that mirror ecological changes in the present day. An abrupt cooling period 5,500 years ago resulted in two dramatic species declines: 1) hemlocks lost across New England, and 2) oaks lost on Cape Cod and the Islands. This understanding of climate-induced changes in species diversity may shed light on the timing, pace, spatial pattern, and drivers of forest change today and in the future.

The study’s authors represent a diverse cross-section of Harvard Forest staff, students, and affiliates: former Bullard Fellows Wyatt Oswald and Matts Lindbladh; Director David Foster; Research Assistant emeritus Elaine Doughty; GIS Specialist Brian Hall; long-time research affiliates Bryan Shuman, Ed Faison, and Barbara Hansen; and two former undergraduates from the HF Summer Research Program: Adriana Marroquin and Sarah Truebe.

Series of maps with circles indicating hemlock pollen abundance at 1000 year intervals

(Photo by Jenny Meskauskas)

Museum Screening & Panel to Feature Old-Growth Forests

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A new film about the history and science of old-growth forests in central New England will premiere at the Fisher Museum in Petersham on Tuesday, July 10 at 7:00 p.m.  Remarks and a brief panel discussion will follow the 1-hour documentary and feature the filmmaker, scientists interviewed in the film, and conservation leaders looking to preserve these forests in central Massachusetts. The event is free and open to the public, and will close with an audience Q&A.

Today, far less than 1 percent of forests in New England are considered “old-growth,” meaning they have not been cut since European settlement. Throughout the region, these forests are scattered over only about 100 sites, several of which are in Massachusetts, mostly on ridges that are difficult to access.

The film, called The Lost Forests of New England, includes rich footage of these rarely-seen, old trees, and tells the story of what the forests once were, the changes that have taken place since European settlers arrived, and the state of those remnant old-growth forests today. It took two years to make the finished product, which filmmaker Ray Asselin says is his most ambitious to date.

The panel will feature: 
Ray Asselin, Filmmaker, New England Forests blog
David Foster, Director, Harvard Forest
Scott Jackson, Board Chair, Kestrel Land Trust
Bob Leverett, Co-founder, Native Tree Society
William Moomaw, Professor of Int’l Environmental Policy at Tufts University’s Fletcher School
David Orwig, Forest Ecologist, Harvard Forest
Heidi Ricci, Assistant Director of Advocacy, Mass Audubon

The wild areas that include these old-growth forest sites are a key part of the Wildlands and Woodlands conservation vision co-authored by many scientists at the Harvard Forest, with colleagues around the region.

(Photo by Ray Asselin)