#Snow melts faster under trees than in open areas in mild climatesit's a foggy fall morning
and University of Washington researcher Susan Dickerson-Lange pokes her index finger into the damp soil beneath a canopy of second-growth conifers.
The tree cover is dense here and little light seeps in among the understory of the Cedar River Municipal Watershed about 30 miles east of Seattle.
She digs a small hole in the leaf-litter soil then pushes a thumb-sized device called an ibutton about an inch beneath the surface.
This fieldwork piggybacks on a recent finding by Jessica Lundquist a UW associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and her lab that shows that tree cover actually causes snow to melt more quickly on the western slopes of the Pacific Northwest's Cascade
Common sense says that the shade of a tree will help retain snow and snow exposed to sunlight in open areas will melt.
Snow tends to melt under the tree canopy and stay more intact in open meadows or gaps in a forest.
because trees in warmer maritime forests radiate heat in the form of long-wave radiation to a greater degree than the sky does.
Heat radiating from the trees contributes to snow melting under the canopy first. Trees melt our snow
but it lasts longer if you open up some gaps in the forest Lundquist said. The hope is that this paper gives us more of a global framework for how we manage our forests to conserve snowpack.
and implements forest restoration projects in the Cedar River Watershed. Reservoirs in the western Cascades hold approximately a year's supply of water.
and a large swath of dense second-growth trees grows there now. Watershed managers have tried thinning and cutting gaps in parts of the forest to encourage more tree
and plant diversity--that then leads to more diverse animal habitat--offering the UW a variety of sites to monitor.
and how difficult it has been to affect these proteins said Gregory Poon pharmaceutical scientist at Washington state University.
But it has proven difficult to design drugs to affect them Poon said. For this reason they have been called undruggable he said.
and related drugs in humans so these drugs have an important advantage over other classes of drugs that are relatively behind in clinical experience Poon said.
Poon collaborated with researchers at Georgia State university. The team found that derivatives of furamidine can target a specific transcription factor known as PU. 1. Their findings were published in Nucleic acids Research journal.
I am fortunate to be working with some of the best people in this area Poon said referring to his collaborators Dave Boykin and David Wilson of Georgia State university.
and intake of fruit vegetables coffee and sweetened beverages suggests that dietary acids may play a specific role in promoting the development of type 2 diabetes irrespective of the foods
Dr. Gee however has applied now successfully microct to visualize silicified conifer seed cones as old as 150 million years without cutting sawing
Because each specimen is precious the main goal of this research was to study the internal structure of fossil conifer seed cones without destroying
Pinaceae--the pine family Araucariaceae--a family of coniferous trees currently found only in the Southern hemisphere and Cheirolepidiaceae--a now-extinct family of conifers known only from the Mesozoic.
This tells us that 150 million years ago the ancient forests of western North america consisted of members of these three families.
The fossil cones of the Araucariaceae from Utah confirm that this family which now grows naturally in Australasia
and can be found mainly in pine at night hidden away in pine forests crawling on rocks or sitting on stone garden walls.
or vegetables and some tree nuts may have oral allergy syndrome. It is also known as pollen-food syndrome
Not everyone with a pollen allergy will experience oral allergy syndrome when eating raw produce and tree nuts.
which fix a modest amount of nitrogen that mostly stays on site in soils trees and shrubs.
On the floodplains high rates of nitrogen fixation occur in thick slimy black mats of cyanobacteria growing in seasonably submerged sediments and coating the exposed roots and stems of willows and sedges.
We joke and call the floodplains the'mangroves of the North 'because there are almost impenetrable tangles of willow tree roots in places like a micro version of the tropical and subtropical mangroves that are known to harbor highly active colonies of cyanobacteria Deluca said.
It turns out there's a lot of nitrogen fixation going on in both he said. For example thescientists discovered that
The amount of nitrogen provided by the cyanobacteria to unharvested willows and sedges is perhaps a quarter of
This is probably because these forests are often dominated by small fast growing trees. It may take centuries for larger trees
which hold more carbon to become established. In contrast although the number of tree species recovered relatively rapidly many species characteristic of old-growth forests were rare in regrowing forests.
This is worrying because these species are probably those most vulnerable to extinction. The research team conducted a synthesis of data collected from more than 600 secondary forest sites from 74 previous studies describing carbon pools
when conservationists aim to restore tropical forests they should help dispersal of seeds from undisturbed to regrowing areas by planting trees throughout the wider landscape.#
#Stressed-out trees boost sugary rewards to ant defenderswhen water is scarce Ecuador laurel trees ramp up their investment in a syrupy treat that sends resident ant defenders into overdrive protecting the trees
The water-stressed tropical forest trees support the production of more honeydew a sugary excretion imbibed by the Azteca ants that nest in the laurels'stem cavities.
The mutually beneficial interaction between laurels and ants which also involves tiny sap-sucking bugs called scale insects that make the honeydew is a well-known example of
and her colleagues identify a clear-cut case of a stress-strengthened ant-tree mutualism and suggest a possible mechanism underlying it one based on interspecies carbon exchange.
Their results suggest that trees at drier sites buy insurance for their leaves in the form of beefed-up ant protection
We show that trees and their defensive ants invest more in one another in drier more stressful conditions Pringle said.
To test whether water limitation strengthens the defensive mutualism between Ecuador laurel trees (Cordia alliodora) and Azteca ants (Azteca pittieri) Pringle and her colleagues studied the interaction at 26 sites in seasonally dry tropical forests along the Pacific coast of southern Mexico and Central America.
Ecuador laurels are deciduous shedding their leaves during the dry season and growing new ones each rainy season.
Pringle and her colleagues found that the strength of the tree-ant mutualism--as measured by investment of trees in sugar for ants
through the scale insects the trees indirectly pay a carbon fee in the form of sugar-rich sap that is distilled into honeydew to the ants in exchange for guard duty.
and defend trees more effectively responding more quickly to disturbances. When ants patrolling the surface of the tree encounter a leaf-eating insect they bite the insect until it falls from the tree Pringle said.
We found that at the drier sites the larger ant colonies were more likely to find such intruders
which are used for food by the trees the scale insects and the ants. Defoliation is a greater potential threat at the drier sites
because laurels there have smaller carbon reserves and a shorter rainy season means they have less time to replace lost leaves.
Pringle and her colleagues used a mathematical model to test this idea looking at the relative costs and benefits of carbon trading between trees and ants under rainy seasons of varying durations.
which ants protect trees from rare but life-threatening defoliation events best fit observations from the 26 sites.
Like farmers buying crop insurance the trees at drier sites appear to be hedging their bets:
but potentially lethal insect attacks may drive the evolution of tree-ant mutualistic strategies under different precipitation regimes.
#Galaxy growth examined like rings of a treewatching a tree grow might be more frustrating than waiting for a pot to boil
but luckily for biologists there are tree rings. Beginning at a tree trunk's dense core and moving out to the soft bark the passage of time is marked by concentric rings revealing chapters of the tree's history.
Galaxies outlive trees by billions of years making their growth impossible to see. But like biologists reading tree rings astronomers can read the rings in a galaxy's disk to unravel its past.
Using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) scientists have acquired more evidence for the inside-out theory of galaxy growth showing that bursts of star formation in central regions were followed one to two billion years later
by star birth in the outer fringes. Initially a rapid star-forming period formed the mass at the center of these galaxies followed later by a star-forming phase in the outer regions.
This picture has changed with the publication of a new study in the latest issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology that describes a new giant species of extinct platypus that was a side-branch of the platypus family tree.
and small turtles that are preserved with it in the Two Tree Site fossil deposit. The oldest platypus fossils come from 61 million-year-old rocks in southern South america.
because prior to this the fossil record suggested that the evolutionary tree of platypuses was relatively linear one said Dr. Michael Archer of the University of New south wales a co-author of the study.
Now we realize that there were unanticipated side branches on this tree some of which became gigantic.
and data from the few remaining snippets of this vanishing ecosystem said Katherine Pollard an investigator at the Gladstone Institutes in San francisco
#Warm winters let trees sleep longerin the temperate zones vegetation follows the change of the seasons.
Since warmer winters can be expected as the climate changes the spring development phase for typical forest trees might start later
and invasive trees that don't depend on the cold. In a recently published study researchers at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) investigated 36 tree
and shrub species. Their work delivered a surprising result as lead author Julia Laube explains:
This applies above all to native tree species such as beech and oak because they rely on resting in the cold to protect themselves from freezing by late spring frosts.
A different behavior is observed among pioneer species--including shrubs such as hazel bushes and primary settlers such as birch trees--and among species like locust and walnut that have moved in from warmer climate zones.
These trees take the risk of starting earlier in the spring because they are less strongly dependent on the cold periods Laube says
and in addition they sprout more quickly as temperatures rise. Advantage for shrubs and new tree speciesthere may be consequences for the forest ecosystem.
After mild winters the native species run a higher risk of developing their leaves too late.
and that benefits lower-growing shrubs and invasive tree species. They sprout earlier to the detriment of native species:
Young trees for example still low to the ground may not receive the light they need to grow.
Even under warmer conditions we won't be seeing'green Christmases'under freshly blooming trees says Prof.
The native tree species in our forests have limited only a ability to adapt themselves to climate change.
Shortened winter in the climate chamberfor their experiments the researchers used twigs around 30 centimeters long from 36 different trees and shrubs
which Bavarian state foresters have planted stands of trees from different climate regions. The cold effect showed most strongly with the beeches the hornbeams and the North american sugar maple.
With shortened cold periods bud burst occurred significantly later. In contrast the lilac the hazel bush
and the birch proved to be less dependent on the cold. Overall however a chaotic picture emerges Menzel adds.
#Redwood trees reveal history of west coast rain, fog, ocean conditionsmany people use tree ring records to see into the past.
But redwoods--the iconic trees that are the world's tallest living things--have so far proven too erratic in their growth patterns to help with reconstructing historic climate.
A University of Washington researcher has developed a way to use the trees as a window into coastal conditions using oxygen
and carbon atoms in the wood to detect fog and rainfall in previous seasons. This is really the first time that climate reconstruction has ever been said done with redwoods Jim Johnstone who recently completed a postdoctoral position at the UW-based Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and the Ocean.
He is corresponding author of a study published online Oct 24 in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Biogeosciences.
While coastal redwoods are not the longest-lived trees on the West Coast they do contain unique information about their foggy surroundings.
Redwoods are restricted to a very narrow strip along the coastline Johnstone said. They're tied to the coastline
The new study used cores from Northern California coastal redwoods to trace climate back 50 years.
Weather records from that period prove the method is accurate suggesting it could be used to track conditions through the thousand or more years of the redwoods'lifetime.
Tree-ring research or dendrochronology typically involves a detailed look at a cross-section of a tree trunk.
But the rings of a redwood are uneven and don't always fully encircle the tree making it a poor candidate for anything except detecting historic fires.
The new paper uses a painstaking approach that's more like processing ice cores. It uses the molecules captured in the wood to sample the atmosphere of the past.
and blows on land where it drips down through the branches until the trees use it like rainwater.
so redwoods may be able to tell us something about the long-term patterns of ocean change such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
It's possible that the redwoods could give us direct indication of how that's worked over longer periods Johnstone said.
and provide a first record of a conifer-feeding caterpillar. The two new species Parasa viridiflamma and Parasa minwangi described from China
The scientists provide the first record of a caterpillar from the group feeding exclusively on pine trees Picea morrisonicola in Taiwan.
This case represents the first record of conifer-feeding behavior in this family as well as the first specialist herbivore in the genus. Meanwhile the background match between Picea leaves
and larval colouration is shared with other Picea-feeding insects. This phenomenon is worth further investigation in the aspect of convergent evolution of crypsis
Surrounding them a stand of youngish trees--paper birch sugar maple white ash--forms a pleasing green glow.
The trees are reclaiming a farm field abandoned in the 1930s. Each tree as it grows sucks in carbon dioxide from the air converting some of it into leaves and wood.
In other words a forest stores carbon from the atmosphere that would otherwise contribute to the greenhouse effect--and global warming.
But for all the carbon being stored in these trees aboveground a roughly equal amount of carbon is stored belowground.
--and the tree and understory species that depend on this system. A lot of plants that use the duff layer as a germination medium or a seed bank will no longer be around says Gorres.
or intensive tree harvesting--can dramatically change the amount of carbon stored in that land's soils.
The research is a collaboration between the Nerve-Gut Research Laboratory (University of Adelaide) and Ironwood Pharmaceuticals Inc the developers of Linaclotide.
It is marketed by Ironwood and Forest Laboratories Inc as Linzess in the US and by Ironwood and Almirall SA as Constella in Europe.
Ironwood has partnerships through which it is conducting clinical trials of Linaclotide in China and Japan.
Ironwood is exploring partnership opportunities for advancing Linaclotide in unpartnered territories including Australia and New zealand.
Dr Brierley in the Nerve-Gut Research Laboratory collaborated with Ironwood to further investigate how Linaclotide acts within the gastrointestinal tract to reduce abdominal pain.
and sent them to 289 preselected forest plots to measure the number of trees tree girth and biomass per hectare.
The CAO uses Light Detection and Ranging (Lidar) a technology that sweeps laser light across the vegetation canopy to image it in 3-D. It can determine the location of single standing trees at 3
The natural product obtained in this manner exhibited the same quality as the conventional rubber from rubber trees that has been imported from subtropical countries
It's because the rubber extraction from the dandelion root is affected markedly less by weather than the rubber obtained from the rubber tree.
They succeeded in proving that the rubber extracted from dandelion is of the same quality as its cousin from the rubber tree.
Compared to the rubber tree it has three decisive advantages: Its vegetation period only lasts one year not several years.
The idea prevails as trees cannot continue to grow until they reach the sky there must obviously be a yield ceiling.
In previous research Warren showed that a cold-tolerant ant species Aphaenogaster picea has been displaced in northern Georgia by a warm-adapted ant species Aphaenogaster rudis during three decades of rising
A. picea ends its winter dormancy in early spring when the minimum temperature reaches 4 C;
A. rudis requires a late spring minimum temperature of 10 C as a result A. picea forages in early spring
Successful species interactions require that the species involved share the same cue said Warren. The cold-adapted A. picea ant species shares temperature cues with Anemone americana a common early spring wildflower that drops
Half were planted at sites north of the A. picea/A. rudis boundary and half south of that boundary.
However the early blooming A. americana offspring south of the A. picea/A. rudis boundary (where only A. rudis occurs) clustered around the parent plant indicating no dispersal.
however in the northern site where A. picea have not been displaced. These results suggest that the presence
Miombo is the Swahili word for the Brachystegia genus of trees which are an important tree species within miombo woodlands.
#Gilding the gum tree: Scientists strike gold in leaveseucalyptus trees in the Kalgoorlie region of Western australia are drawing up gold particles from Earth via their root system
and depositing it their leaves and branches. Scientists from CSIRO made the discovery and have published their findings in the journal Nature Communications.
The eucalypt acts as a hydraulic pump--its roots extend tens of metres into the ground
or soil underneath the trees could indicate gold ore deposits buried up to tens of metres underground
Eucalyptus trees are so common that this technique could be applied widely across Australia It could also be used to find other metals such as zinc and copper.
Before enthusiasts rush to prospect this gold from the trees or even the leaf litter you need to know that these are tiny nuggets
when the fruits in your favourite food tree are gone and you don't know which other tree has produced new fruit yet?
An international team of researchers led by Karline Janmaat from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig Germany studied
whether chimpanzees aim their travel to particular rainforest trees to check for fruit and how they increase their chances of discovering bountiful fruit crops.
and location of fruit trees and remember feeding experiences from previous seasons using a memory window
They found that chimpanzees fed on significantly larger trees than other reproductively mature trees of the same species especially
Interestingly trees that were checked merely for edible fruit but where monitoring could not have been triggered by smell
or the sound of fallen fruit because the trees did not carry fruit were also larger.
The researchers found that chimpanzees checked most trees along the way during travel but 13%were approached in a goal-directed manner.
and when trees were opposed large as to small. The results suggested that their monitoring was guided by a long-term what-where memory of the location of large potential food trees.
For their results researchers analysed which of nearly 16000 potential food trees with different crown sizes were approached actually by the chimpanzees.
Observations on one female followed intensively over three consecutive summers suggested that she was able to remember feeding experiences across fruiting seasons.
Long-term phenological data on individual trees indicated that the interval between successive fruiting seasons and hence the minimal memory window of chimpanzees required for effective monitoring activities could vary from two months to three years.
and remember feeding experiences long after trees have been emptied says Karline Janmaat of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
The main message of the researchers is that a functioning forest ecosystem is much more than just trees.
For example species dependent on old trees decayed wood or burned wood have disappeared in many areas says researcher Panu Halme from the Department of Biological and Environmental science at the University of Jyvã¤skylã¤.
and attempting to dismantle the Reconyx camera traps secured to trees. One series of images shows a particularly determined bear attacking a camera
The water stored in the soil at the end of the wet season is all that the rainforest trees have to last them through the dry season.
The longer the dry season lasts regardless of how wet the wet season was stressed the more the trees become
#Economic assessment of mountain pine beetle timber salvagea recently published study by U s. Forest Service researchers evaluates potential revenues from harvesting standing timber killed by mountain pine beetle in the western
A mountain pine beetle epidemic in the western United states has covered left mountainsides with dead pines especially lodgepole pine with most of the timber
Policymakers and forest managers are considering increasing timber salvage rates on these lands as a way to address potential wildfire threat hazards from falling trees
and Colorado--two states heavily affected by the mountain pine beetle--to evaluate the effects of efforts to encourage
Ceanothus americanus Corylus cornuta Lonicera canadensis and Viburnum acerifolium. They said that these shrubs have the potential to become revenue generators for the nursery industry
They found that timing had no significant effect on rooting percentage root count or root length of Corylus cornuta or Viburnum acerifolium.
Another standout in the study was Corylus cornuta which the researchers said can be propagated at 85%rooting
Our results indicated that Corylus cornuta in addition to Viburnum acerifolium has the potential to be a new nursery crop Lubell said.
The study recommends that rooted cuttings of both Corylus cornuta and Viburnum acerifolium should be left in rooting containers for a period of cold dormancy before transplanting
although Corylus cornuta and Viburnum acerifolium showed the most promise as commercially viable nursery crops further propagation research could validate all four of the native species in the study as recommended crops for general wholesale
In 2009 cucumber became the seventh plant to have published its genome sequence following the well-studied model plant Arabidopsis thaliana the poplar tree grapevine papaya and the crops rice and sorghum.
#Scientists estimate 16,000 tree species in the Amazonresearchers taxonomists and students from The Field Museum and 88 other institutions around the world have provided new answers to two simple but longstanding questions
How many trees are there in the Amazon and how many tree species occur there? The study will be published October 17 2013 in Science.
The vast extent and difficult terrain of the Amazon basin (including parts of Brazil Peru Columbia) and the Guiana Shield (Guyana Suriname and French guiana)
which span an area roughly the size of the 48 contiguous North american states has restricted historically the study of their extraordinarily diverse tree communities to local and regional scales.
and conservationists don't know which Amazonian tree species face the most severe threats of extinction says Nigel Pitman Robert O. Bass Visiting Scientist at The Field Museum in Chicago
Now however over 100 experts have contributed data from 1170 forestry surveys in all major forest types in the Amazon to generate the first basin-wide estimates of the abundance frequency and spatial distribution of thousands of Amazonian trees.
and the Guiana Shield harbors around 390 billion individual trees including Brazil nut chocolate and aã§ai berry trees.
We think there are roughly 16000 tree species in Amazonia but the data also suggest that half of all the trees in the region belong to just 227 of those species
Thus the most common species of trees in the Amazon now not only have a number they also have a name.
This is very valuable information for further research and policymaking says Hans ter Steege first author on the study and researcher at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in South Holland Netherlands.
While the study suggests that hyperdominants--just 1. 4 percent of all Amazonian tree species--account for roughly half of all carbon
The study also offers insights into the rarest tree species in the Amazon. According to the mathematical model used in the study roughly 6000 tree species in the Amazon have populations of fewer than 1000 individuals
which automatically qualifies them for inclusion in the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. The problem say the authors is that these species are so rare that scientists may never find them.
There's a really interesting debate shaping up says Pitman between people who think that hyperdominant trees are common
and people who think those trees were dominant long before humans ever arrived in The americas.
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