On Thursday, December 8, Jim Vose, project leader of the U.S. Forest Service Integrated Forest Science accepted the Chief’s Award – one of the highest honors in the Forest Service — in the category of “Sustaining Forests and Grasslands.” Vose accepted as leader of a team that the award honored for “understanding the impacts of drought on the nation’s forests and grasslands: providing a scientific foundation for effective management responses.” read more…

The National Assessment was led by Jim Vose, Jim Clark, Charlie Luce, and Toral Patel-Weynand:  Effects of Drought on Forests and Rangelands in the United States: A Comprehensive Science Synthesis,

early view here, pdf here clarkms, appendixs1

To understand the importance of analytical tools such as those provided by Berdanier et al. (2016) in this issue of Tree Physiology, one must understand both the grand challenges facing Earth system modelers, more…

Daniel Taylor-Rodriquez led this analysis and produced best poster, awarded by the Env Section of ISBA.ISBAposter2016

early view in Ecology

Trait analysis aims to understand relationships between traits, species diversity, and the environment. Current methods could benefit from a model-based probabilistic framework that accommodates covariance between traits and quantifies contributions from inherent trait syndromes, species interactions, and responses to the environment… read more

Predicting whole-tree water use requires models that accommodate the variation in sap flux between wood types and by depth into the tree. We develop a method for scaling-up flux observations. As an illustrative example, we predict sap flux for a forest in North Carolina, quantifying changes in water use with tree species and size. We include computer software for generating whole-tree flow estimates with other observations in Excel^® and the R programming language.

treePhys_berdanier2016

treePhys_berdanier2016Suppl

10 things you may not have known about trees/forests

Three papers published, a fourth ready to submit, see Publications    

video coverage (go  to time 2:42 in this clip)

Huffington Post

Science360News

weatherNewsNetwork

UPI

Christian Science Monitor

 

 

Forests nationwide are feeling the heat from increasing drought and climate change, according to a new study by scientists from 14 research institutions… read more

Generalized Joint Attribute Modeling for R for jointly modeling species, traits, and other responses, see Code .

A new article published in Ecological Applications by Berdanier and Clark about forests and drought in the Southeast US.

It is featured by the Nicholas School of the Environment and ClimateWire.

The article can be found here:
Aaron Baird Berdanier and James S. Clark In press. Multi-year drought-induced morbidity preceding tree death in Southeastern US forests. Ecological Applications. http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/15-0274.1
http://www.esajournals.org/doi/10.1890/15-0274.1

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The timing of the first leaves on trees and plants can make or break an agricultural season. Too early, and the leaves might be blasted by the last frost. Too late and they miss out on maximizing the growing season.

But as climate change brings warmer-than-usual winters to the U.S., the plants may be more vulnerable to imprecise timing, and the tools traditionally used by farmers and horticulturists to predict the season may be inadequate. [more]

In Red Orbit

Clark, J.S., J. Melillo, J. Mohan, and C. Salk. 2013. The seasonal timing of warming that controls onset of the growing season. Global Change Biology, in press.

 

Many climate studies have predicted that tree species will respond to global warming by migrating via seed dispersal to cooler climates. But a new study of 65 different species in 31 eastern states finds evidence of a different, unexpected response… [more]

When stomata are open, the trade-off between water loss through transpiration and CO₂ uptake via photosynthesis is a result of the evolutionary history of land plants from green algae… [more]

 

From the announcement: I am pleased to announce this year’s winner of the Dean’s Award for best PhD student manuscript:

Denis Valle for his paper: Conservation Efforts May Increase Malaria Burden in the Brazilian Amazon, in PLOS ONE Volume 8, issue 3.  Denis will receive an award of $3,000 for his paper.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awards a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (DDIG) to Kai Zhu for support of the project entitled “DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Forest climate requirements change through species life history.” This award is effective May 1 , 2013 and expires April 30, 2014. [more]