The recent paper published in American Journal of Botany by former post-doc Jim Karagatzides and Senior Ecologist Aaron Ellison (see September highlights) was featered in a slide show on Discovery News, the website of the Discovery Channel.
Recent Harvard Forest post-doc Jim Karagatzides has published two papers based on his research with Harvard Forest Senior Ecologist Aaron Ellison. In the first, using stable isotope tracers in the field, Jim showed that Sarracenia purpurea can acquire nitrogen directly from amino acids, bypassing the inorganic nitrogen cycle on which
Katie Bennett, a fifth-grade teacher at Ashburnham's J.R.Briggs Elementary School, a long-time participant in the Harvard Forest Schoolyard LTER Program and an NSF Research Experience for Teachers (RET) collaborator on ant and pitcher-plant research, has published her first paper in Biology Letters, the rapid communication journal of the Royal Society of London. In this paper, Katie, along with
In Honor of Charles Darwin, A Review of Carnivorous Plants
As part of the festivities surrounding the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of his book On the origin of species by means of natural selection, the Journal of Experimental Botany commissioned a series of review articles on topics about which Darwin wrote
In April's Ecology, former research assistant Jess Butler and her co-authors Nick Gotelli (University of Vermont) and Aaron Ellison (Harvard Forest Senior Ecologist) reported the surprising finding that the complex food web of macroinvertebrates inhabiting leaves of the pitcher plant Sarracenia purpurea contribute little to the nutrient budget of this carnivorous plant. Rather, bacteria provide the key link between the
Former Harvard Forest Bullard Fellow Elizabeth Farnsworth and Harvard Forest Senior Ecologist Aaron Ellison examine scaling relationships among leaf traits of 10 species of pitcher plants (Sarracenia species) fed different quantities of insect prey. Increased prey availability increased photosystem efficiencey (as expressed by the ratio of Fv/Fm), chlorophyll content, and photosynthetic rate. It also led to a shift from P-
The analysis of stomata in lake-sediment cores is increasingly used as a paleoecological tool. Stomata are less likely than pollen grains to be dispersed over long distances, and thus stomate records supplement and enhance interpretations based on pollen data by providing information about patterns and composition of local vegetation. We have conducted the first study of this type in New
Harvard Forest senior research fellow Aaron Ellison was interviewed for BBC Wildlife Magazine about his research on carnivorous plants. Read the interview.
Climate Change affected major forest ecosystems dynamics
The mid-Holocene decline of eastern hemlock is widely viewed as the sole prehistorical example of an insect- or pathogen-mediated collapse of a North American tree species and has been extensively studied for insights into pest–host dynamics and the consequences to terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems of dominant-species removal. We report paleoecological evidence implicating climate as
Plant and animal population sizes inevitably change following habitat loss, but the mechanisms underlying these changes are poorly understood. In a new study published in PLoS Biology, University of Vermont biology professor Nicholas Gotelli and Harvard Forest senior ecologist Aaron Ellison provide the first experimental confirmation that trophic structure can determine species abundances in the face of habitat loss. In