ForestGEO Researchers Receive New Funding to Explore Forest Function

A National Science Foundation grant of nearly $1 million will fund new research at two ForestGEO sites – Harvard Forest and Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) starting later this year.  The $965,000 award was granted to University of Maryland Associate Professor and ForestGEO partner Nathan Swenson, ForestGEO Director Stuart Davies, and Temperate Forest Program Coordinator Sean McMahon to investigate forest function from genes to canopies. The research aims to quantify how inter- and intra-annual differential gene expression in leaves and genotypic differentiation are related to leaf level gas exchange, fine scale measurements of tree growth, and carbon dioxide flux measured at the scale of forest canopies.

Forests’ ability to absorb and store carbon dioxide makes them integral to regulating climate change. But the thousands of individual trees within a forest vary greatly in their physiological and growth response to environmental change. In order to predict future forest functioning, individual leaf processes need to be linked to larger forest level processes. This research will use innovative new technology and specific measurements of individual tree growth and physiology to address this challenge.  

Harvard Forest, USA

“The work uniquely scales from genes to ecosystems while simultaneously considering spatial and temporal variation in forest function”, said Swenson. “Ecology is entering a exciting new age where the substantial advances made in genome and transcriptome sequencing can now be utilized in non-model organisms in the wild. Coupling these advances in ‘omics with detailed measurements of plant performance from the leaf to the canopy scale was thought to be impossible only a few years ago and it is expected to transform ecology”.

Harvard Forest and SERC are also part of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), which is supported by NSF. It is a network of ecological observation facilities with sites across the U.S. that gathers and analyzes data on climate change, land use change, invasive species, and how these influence biodiversity and natural resources. Goals of NEON include forecasting continental-scale environmental change, informing natural resource decisions, and engaging the next generation of scientists.

Enumeration Progress at Harvard Forest

The census of woody stems within the 35-ha Harvard Forest plot began on 1 June 2010. Using standardized CTFS-SIGEO methodology, Dave Orwig and three 2-person crews measured, tagged, painted, and mapped every stem greater than 1 cm in diameter at 1.3 m. By 27 August, when vegetation sampling for the year ended, 29,908 stems had been tagged, mapped, and measured, representing approximately 13 hectares.

The 3 western columns were particularly dense, containing dense thickets of mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia). Stem densities averaged 2,301/ha and ranged from 1,756 to 3,071/ha. All stems were entered twice into the temporary database during the summer, and Dave Orwig will continue to screen and edit all data for uploading to the database during autumn 2010. In addition, work will proceed with digitally mapping all stems contained on the 1,300 10 x 10 maps produced from the 13 ha of forest.

Videos of Harvard Talks Now Online

Videos of the presentations at the Arnold Arboretum-CTFS Harvard Plant Biology Symposium in April are now available online for viewing at
http://arboretum.harvard.edu/research/center-for-tropical-forest-science-arnold-arboretum-asia-program/pbi/.

Harvard University's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology (OEB) in partnership with the CTFS-Arnold Arboretum (CTFS-AA) program hosted the 6th Annual Harvard Plant Biology Symposium. This year's theme was "Trees and the Global Environment." The symposium was supported by CTFS-AA, OEB, and the HSBC Climate Partnership.

The talks represented both empirical and modeling/theory perspectives from diverse disciplines in plant science and resource economics. Presentations ranged from the functional responses of individual trees to changing environmental conditions all the way up to ecosystem and landscape-scale responses. For more information, please visit: http://www.pbi.fas.harvard.edu/events.htm.

Harvard Forest Plot Underway

by David A. Orwig

Harvard Forest researchers, with the assistance of scientists from CTFS-SIGEO, began the census of woody stems on June 1, 2010. The 35-ha plot is dominated by eastern hemlock and northern hardwood species and will make an excellent comparison with several other hardwood plots in North America and China at similar latitudes.

To date, over 13,000 stems have been tagged, mapped, and measured, representing approximately 4.5 hectares. Some of the quadrats were particularly dense, containing dense thickets of mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia). Over the course of the summer, Forest Ecologist David Orwig and six crew members will continue sampling in the western portion of the plot.

The Harvard Forest plot forms part of a global array of large-scale plots established by CTFS-SIGEO, which recently expanded sampling efforts into temperate forests to explore ecosystem processes beyond population dynamics and biodiversity. The geography and size of the plot (500 m x 700 m) was designed to include a continuous, expansive, and varied natural forest landscape that will yield opportunities for the study of forest dynamics and demography while capturing a large amount of existing science infrastructure (e.g., eddy flux towers, gauged sections of a small watershed, existing smaller permanent plots) that will enable the integrated study of ecosystem processes (e.g., biogeochemistry, hydrology, carbon dynamics) and forest dynamics. Thus the resulting data will integrate well with ongoing NSF-funded LTER (Long Term Ecological Research) and NEON (National Ecological Observatory Network) studies.

Harvard Symposium Focuses on Trees and the Global Environment

Last week, the 6th Annual Harvard Plant Biology Symposium drew a crowd of several hundred people to hear (in Cambridge and via the Web) a multidisciplinary group of researchers present some of today’s most advanced science and social science related to trees and the global environment.

The symposium was co-organized and hosted by the Harvard University Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and CTFS-Arnold Arboretum with support from the HSBC Climate Partnership. See Alvin Powell’s article in the Harvard Gazette for a summary of the symposium. Videos of the talks are available online for viewing at http://arboretum.harvard.edu/research/pbi.html.