Chiricahua Mountains Fire (from Bob)

On the way to the Chiricahua Mountains, we had a few adventures. One, my favorite highway sign in the United States. The fissure it refers to is probably because of groundwater pumping.

Second, a fire, now 27,000 acres large, has been burning for a week on the east side of the Chiricahua Mts. The Southwest Research Station at Portal was evacuated a few days ago. Miriam Roe took these pictures yesterday (Monday, 16 May) from east Turkey Creek. In the second photo, you can see the Forest Service plane dropping the fire retardant.

Bob’s Desert Adventures

Now that the winter has broken and flowers are out in Rochester, and the temperature in the deserts of North America are over 90 degrees each day, the only sensible place to go is the Sonoran Desert. The Minckley lab (Robert, Bob, Roberto, Rob, Adrian and Chan) is headed to northern Sonora for the rest of May and June. No bees are out this time of year, but the perennial plants are. We will be resurveying plants on plots first established in the year 2000 to see how the species composition and cover has changed over the last decade. In 2000, all grazing and agriculture was stopped in this area. We will keep you posted.

The pictures are from Three Points, Arizona-a suburb of Tucson. Saguaro cactus (Carnegiea gigantea), left. A Prickly Pear cactus (Opuntia engelmannii), right.

The Desert Tortoises (Gopherus agassizii) were born on 9 Sept 2010.

Plant Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Reading Group

Thursday 4pm, Hutch 316

We have a couple of special presentations this week. Annalise Kjolhede (left) and Julia Cosgrove (right) will present overviews of their undergraduate honors theses.

Annalise will be presenting her work on the soils and geology of Monroe County entitled “The Influence of Landforms and Soils on the Vegetation of Monroe County, New York.”

Julia will be presenting her work on forest structure and coarse woody debris entitled “Stand Structure and Down Woody Debris in Beech-Maple Old-Growth Forests of the Rochester Area.”

Plant Ecology and Evolution Reading Group

Thursday, 4pm Hutch 316

This week we will be talking about the effects of land-use history and the environment on plant distributions. For example, eastern forests were largely cut to make way for agriculture throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. With the abandonment of eastern agricultural lands in the 20th century, forests have been regenerating and expanding from forest remnants on land deemed poor for agriculture. More recently, however, urban sprawl and renewed timber cutting has mostly halted the spread of eastern forests.

Flinn, K.M., M. Vellend, and P.L. Marks. 2005. Environmental causes and consequences of forest clearance and agricultural abandonment in central New York, USA. Journal of Biogeography 32:439-452. [doi link]

Drummond, M.A., and T.R. Loveland. 2010. Land-use pressure and a transition to forest-cover loss in the eastern United States. BioScience 60:286-298. [doi link]

a) UR Woodlands 1930

b) UR Woodlands 1961

c) UR Woodlands 1988

d) UR Woodlands 2005

Plant Ecology and Evolution Reading Group

Thursday 4pm, Hutch 316

This week, we will be reading papers with applied topics related to the University of Rochester Organic Garden…Composting!

The UR Organic Garden is a project started by Annalise Kjolhede and Caitlin Smigelski in collaboration with the Ramsey Lab as part of a fifth year Kauffman Entrepreneurial Year scholarship. Fall Buzz, the U of R’s back-to-school guide, wrote a nice story on their work last year.

Adhikari, B.K., Tremier, A., Martinez, J., and S. Barrington. 2010. Home and community composition for on-site treatment of urban organic waste: perspective for Europe and Canada. Waste Management & Research 28:1039-1053. [doi link]

Schwarz, M, et al. 2010. Effectiveness of composting road-killed deer in New York state. Composting Science & Utilization 18:232-243. [doi link]

Plant Ecology and Evolution (PEE) Reading Group

Thursday 4 pm, Hutch 316

How can you determine the age of a tree, and thus its “value” (economically, historically, or ecologically)? You might undertake the laborious process of taking a core and counting rings. But, more typically this is achieved by measuring the diameter of the tree and referencing a chart compiled with usual ages for the given species at that diameter. This week we will be reading about the compiling of this data and its uses for understanding past land use history and ecological dynamics.

Bowles, M.L., and M.D. Jones. 2008. Chronological change in old-growth forests of the Chicago region. Report to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and the Chicago Wilderness Society. The Morton Arboreum, Lisle, IL.

Jones, T., Bowles, M., and M. Jones. 2006. Telling a tree’s age. Chicago Wilderness Magazine.