Latest Vegetation Stories
By McKenney, Daniel W Pedlar, John H; Lawrence, Kevin; Campbell, Kathy; Hutchinson, Michael F Currently predicted change in climate could strongly affect plant distributions during the next century. Here we determine the present- day climatic niches for 130 North American tree species. We then locate the climatic conditions of these niches on maps of predicted future climate, indicating where each species could potentially occur by the end of the century. A major unknown in this work is the...
By Fortner, Allison M Weltzin, Jake F FORTNER, A. M. (Environmental Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6351) AND J. F. WELTZIN (Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996-1610). Competitive hierarchy for four common old-field plant species depends on resource identity and availability. J. Torrey Bot. Soc. 134: 166-176. 2007.-Competition is an important factor structuring plant communities. Competitive...
The first soil moisture maps with a spatial resolution of one km are available online for the entire southern African subcontinent. As soil moisture plays an important role in the global water cycle, these maps, based on data from ESA's Envisat satellite, will lead to better weather and extreme-event forecasting, such as floods and droughts."Predicting when and where floods are likely to happen is becoming more and more important," Geoff Pegram of the University of KwaZulu-Natal,...
Data from NASA satellites is advancing efforts that may soon allow scientists to predict when and where wildfires occur.While information from satellites and instruments have recently let scientists more quickly determine the exact location of wildfires and to monitor their movement, this research offers a step toward predicting their development and could complement data currently used in calculating fire potential across much of the United States.By studying shrublands prone to wildfire in...
The Dutch dune area has dried out at a number of locations as a result of water extraction and drainage of adjacent polder areas. Wildlife managers are searching for favourable locations to restore the natural environment to the original wet dune valleys. Chris Bakker has compiled a number of characteristics that a dune valley must satisfy for a successful restoration project to be carried out. Chris Bakker investigated dune valleys in Zuid Kenemerland National Park. He discovered that the...
Scientists at the Woods Hole Research Center are producing a high-resolution "National Biomass and Carbon Dataset" for the year 2000 (NBCD2000), the first ever inventory of its kind. Through a combination of NASA satellite datasets, topographic survey data, land use/land cover data, and extensive forest inventory data collected by the U.S. Forest Service, this "millennium" dataset will serve as an invaluable baseline for carbon stock assessment and flux modeling in the...
Rare and fragmented chalk grasslands may take at least half a century to recover from the damage done to them by military training, according to new research published in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology. Working with historical aerial photographs taken on the Salisbury Plain Training Area between 1945 and 1995, Dr Rachel Hirst and colleagues from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and the University of Liverpool identified 82 sites from which they sampled...
