#Modern growing methods may be culprit of coffee rust fungal outbreaka shift away from traditional coffee-growing techniques may be increasing the severity of an outbreak of'coffee rust'fungus that has swept through plantations in Central america
The current outbreak of coffee rust is seen the worst in Central america and Mexico since the fungal disease arrived in the region more than 40 years ago.
The Guatemalan president said the outbreak could cut coffee production by 40 percent in his country for the 2013-2014 growing season.
Because Central america supplies 14 percent of the world's coffee the outbreak could drive up the price of a cup of coffee.
U-M ecologist John Vandermeer has operated research plots at an organic coffee plantation in southern Chiapas Mexico for about 15 years.
Vandermeer said more than 60 percent of the trees on his study plots now have at least 80 percent defoliation due to coffee rust
Thirty percent of the trees have no leaves at all and nearly 10 percent have died. I have personal reports from friends who work in coffee in Colombia Costa rica El salvador Guatemala Nicaragua and Mexico.
They all say that it's the worst explosion of this disease they've ever seen said Vandermeer a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and at SNRE.
Over the last 20 to 25 years many Latin american coffee farmers have abandoned traditional shade-growing techniques in
which the plants are grown beneath a diverse canopy of trees. In an effort to increase production much of the acreage has been converted to sun coffee
which involves thinning or removing the canopy and a greater reliance on pesticides and fungicides to keep pests in check.
Vandermeer suspects that the shift to sun coffee may be contributing to the severity of the latest coffee rust outbreak.
The move to sun coffee results in a gradual breakdown of the complex ecological web found on shade plantations.
and also helps keep coffee rust fungus in check. Both the widespread use of pesticides and fungicides and the low level of biodiversity found at sun-coffee plantations have contributed likely to the decline of white halo fungus in recent years Vandermeer said.
Without white halo fungus to restrain it coffee rust also known as roya has been able to ravage coffee plantations from Colombia to Mexico he said.
What we feel has been happening is that gradually the integrity of this once-complicated ecosystem has been slowly breaking down
when you try to grow coffee like corn Vandermeer said. And this year it seems to have hit a tipping point where the various things that are antagonistic to the roya in a complex ecosystem have declined to the point where the disease can escape from them
The path this disease takes will have huge implications for the region's coffee producers. Coffee rust is the most important disease of coffee worldwide.
It was discovered first in the vicinity of Lake victoria in East Africa in 1861 and was identified later
The disease soon spread to much of Southeast asia and eventually throughout the southern central and western coffee-growing regions of Africa.
Coffee rust was known not in the Western hemisphere until 1970 when it was found in Bahia Brazil.
Since 1970 the disease has spread to every coffee-growing country in the world according to the Coffee Research Institute.
The rust mainly infects coffee leaves but also young fruit and buds. Coffee rust spores are spread by the wind and the rain from lesions on the underside of leaves.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by University of Michigan. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length h
#Tree die off triggered by hotter temperaturesa team of scientists led by researchers at Carnegie's Department of Global Ecology has determined that the recent widespread die off of Colorado trembling aspen trees is a direct result of decreased precipitation
In 2002 the drought subjected the trees to the most extreme growing season water stress of the past century.
While often not killing the trees directly the drought damaged the ability of the trees to provide water to their leaves leading to a decline in growth
what drought characteristics (seasonal differences severity or durations) actually cause trees to die. Scientists additionally have lacked a sufficient understanding of the processes that lead to die offs
The team looked at the dynamics of water availability to the trees by examining the ratio of oxygen isotopes in the sap contained in the tree veins that transport water.
They tell us about the type of water available to the trees. For instance summer rain has different isotopic ratios than winter snow.
and when the water found in tree veins was taken up which in turn helps us determine drought impacts.
The scientists examined the isotopes in the aspen sap during natural and experimental drought in an area in Colorado that had heavy tree casualties.
It turns out that aspens generally use shallow soil moisture which evaporated quickly with increased temperatures during the summer drought of 2002.
Forests store about 45 percent of the carbon found on land remarked William. Widespread tree death can radically transform ecosystems affecting biodiversity posing fire risks
In a previous study the brothers with colleagues looked at two competing theories for how forest trees die during a drought.
One hypothesis was that the trees starved due to decreased photosynthesis. Another was that the system for transporting water within a tree was damaged beyond repair.
They did find a notable depressed function in the trees'water-transport systems especially in the roots--some 70 percent loss of water conductivity.
and stressing the trees'water-transport system. Joe Berry a co-author and Carnegie staff scientist noted that understanding how
and where the trees get their water was key to unraveling cause and effect in this study.
Since there is a very strong upward trend in Colorado summer temperatures they could link tree death to climate change said Chris Field director of the Carnegie department.
which could indicate more tree die offs are in the pipeline for the near future. Story Source:
#Most comprehensive tree of life shows placental mammal diversity exploded after age of dinosaursan international team of scientists including University of Florida researchers has generated the most comprehensive tree of life to date on placental mammals
The multi-year collaborative project was funded by the National Science Foundation Assembling the Tree of Life Program.
Unlike other reconstructions the new study creates a clearer picture of the tree of life by combining two data types:
Discovering the tree of life is like piecing together a crime scene--it is a story that happened in the past that you can't repeat said lead author Maureen O'Leary an associate professor in the department of anatomical sciences in the School of medicine at Stony Brook University
#Tapping into the rubber plant genomea group of international scientists has sequenced the draft genome sequence of the rubber tree Hevea brasiliensis the major commercial source of natural rubber.
Scientists have sequenced the draft genome sequence of the rubber tree Hevea brasiliensis the major commercial source of natural rubber.
Ahmad Yamin Rahman and colleagues believe that this draft genome information will accelerate the development of high-yielding natural rubber plants.
and were invaded subsequently by trees. More diverse sites resisted woody plant invasion. Diversity also affected fire itself.
A monoculture stand of trees or crops might appear stable and productive for example --but it's an ecosystem that is more vulnerable to collapse he said adding that this study helps explain why species diversity matters.
if carbon dioxide doesn't fertilise tree growth as strongly as climate models suggest. Co-author Chris Jones of the Met Office said:
The pest is called the cycad aulacaspis scale and its invasion into numerous countries in recent years has caused immeasurable loss of biodiversity.
Cycads belong to an ancient lineage of plants that date to the dinosaur era and the pest requires a cycad plant for food.
The insect's recent invasion to the island of Guam has endangered the island's endemic cycad species. Local biologists introduced a voracious beetle predator to the island to eat the scale insects
but the plant damage by the pest has persisted. We began looking into the reasons that the beetle was failing to control the pest
because this pest is threatening cycad populations in other countries. Lessons learned on Guam may benefit cycad conservationists in those other countries.
Marler's research appears in the November issue of the journal Plant Signaling and Behavior.
Bruce Peterjohn chief of the North american Bird Banding Program at the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research center in Laurel MD said Wisdom has raised likely at least 30 to 35 chicks during her breeding life though the number
#Understanding Earths climate prior to the industrial eraclimate signals locked in the layers of glacial ice preserved in the annual growth rings of trees
The annual width or density of tree-rings is influenced not only by temperature while the ring is developing but also from the climate of the past years and other factors like tree age.
This makes it difficult to extract pure temperature signals from these natural archives. Importantly the researchers found out that proxy data underestimate climate fluctuations of for example air temperature over the land surface where large year-to-year variability is common.
and processes fingerprinted in tree-ring ice-core and speleothem records are needed to develop a more accurate history and understanding of the climate system.
#When mangroves no longer protect the coastlinethe mangrove forests in the Guyanas (French guiana Surinam and Guyana) which spread across the Orinoco
However most of the Guyana mangroves have been destroyed to develop the coastal plain. The retreating mangrove wall will result in large-scale coastal erosion threatening populations
and their economic activities as demonstrated in a study conducted by researchers from IRD and the University of Aix-Marseille. Gaining ground on the seaalthough The french Guiana coastline remains protected by human developments for the time being that of Guyana is disrupted already highly.
and agriculture--mainly rice cultivation--the coastal swamp areas have been transformed into polders (3). To this end dikes have been built reducing the 1km mangrove strip to just a few dozen metres wide.
However these dikes do not provide the same level of protection as mangroves against the swell which is the main cause of erosion.
if the mangroves were to disappear completely. Yet they prevent the sedimentation of mud coming from the Amazon
Thus they could assess the high risk of destabilisation of the coastline due to the reduction in mangroves.
The only means of protection consists of rebuilding the mangroves. This assessment will enable the Guyana government to specify the measures for action that should be implemented to help the mangroves recolonise the coastline.
French guiana of which the coastal area in turn suffers growing demographic pressure must also draw lessons from these works
Among them was developed a method by Lippincott-Schwartz and her colleagues called Photoactivated Localization Microscopy or PALM.
When I first saw PALM I was shocked by how good it was. I wanted to use it right away but when
To make PALM more practical for use in biomedical research the team wrote a computer script that allows any biologist to upload
and process PALM images using Amazon Cloud. As a demonstration Cang Lippincott-Schwartz and postdoctoral researcher Ying Hu reconstructed the images of podosomes
Their new paper provides a how-to tutorial for using the code to process PALM images through Amazon Cloud helping the other labs achieve similar increases in speed.
#Planting trees may not reverse climate change, but it will help locallyafforestation planting trees in an area where there have previously been no trees can reduce the effect of climate change by cooling temperate regions finds a study in Biomed Central's open access journal Carbon Balance and Management.
Afforestation would lead to cooler and wetter summers by the end of this century. Without check climate change is projected to lead to summer droughts and winter floods across Europe.
%The large leaf area and low aerodynamic resistance of these types of trees lends itself to enhanced evapotranspiration compared to other vegetation cooling the surrounding air and leading to cooler surface temperatures.
The effect of planting trees depends on the environment of each region. Dr Borbã¡la Gá
While we realize that the amount of afforestation included in our model is unrealistic in practice even a more modest program of planting trees could theoretically reduce the effect of climate change in Northern europe.
With fewer trees to swing from human ancestors began walking to get around. While the shift to bipedalism appears to have occurred somewhere between 6 and 4 million years ago Feakins'study finds that thick rainforests had disappeared already by that point--replaced by grasslands
The JBEI/INL collaboration mixed switchgrass lodgepole pine corn stover and eucalyptus in flour and pellets and within 24 hours of saccharification were able to obtain sugar yields of up to 90-percent
Grasses trees and shrubs have obvious differences but in times of stress their communities exhibit less negative competitive pressure and more facilitative positive interaction.
Analyses of studies of grasses trees and shrubs for example found that despite the obvious differences among these plant types they all shifted toward less negative or more positive interactions.
or neutral effects at high stress whereas less competitive species e g. trees have strong facilitative effects at high stress the authors wrote.
#Biologists use diag trees to help solve gypsy moth mysteryworking beneath the towering oaks and maples on the University of Michigan's central campus Diag undergraduate researchers and their faculty adviser helped explain an observation that had puzzled insect ecologists who study voracious leaf-munching gypsy moth caterpillars.
The caterpillars which defoliate and sometimes kill stands of trees in the Upper Midwest and the Northeast are especially fond of oaks
but sugar maple trees appear to be relatively resistant to the European pest. Biologists wondered whether the caterpillars shun sugar maples in part
because their leaves are less nutritious than the leaves of other trees. To find out U-M biochemist Ray Barbehenn
and several of his undergraduate research assistants compared the protein quality of red oak and sugar maple leaves from trees on the Diag.
What they found runs counter to conventional wisdom on the topic which states that protein quality in leaves differs significantly from species to species
. Instead Barbehenn and his students found that the amino acid composition of the proteins in red oak
and sugar maple leaves is strikingly similar--so similar in fact that they could not be distinguished during the spring
when gypsy moths do most of their feeding. However the researchers found that protein is more abundant in oak leaves than in maple leaves.
Instead of differences in protein quality we showed that maple trees have lower quantities of protein than oak partly explaining why they are less nutritious than oak leaves said Barbehenn an associate research scientist in the Department of Molecular Cellular and Developmental
Biology and Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. The amount of essential amino acids in oak leaves was 30-42 percent higher than the EAA content of maple leaves in the spring and summer.
These results help us understand the nutritional reasons why insects perform better or worse on different species of plants.
This kind of information is needed in agriculture and forestry to improve the resistance of plants to insect pests he said.
In the short term though this is basic research that is driven by the curiosity of ecologists to understand nature better.
In the gypsy moth study the students used a long-pole pruner to reach into the crowns of Diag oaks and maples and collect leaves.
The whole-body essential amino acid composition of gypsy moth caterpillars was measured to estimate their optimum dietary protein composition which was compared with the EAA compositions of oak and maple leaves.
The ability to literally walk out the door to work on tree defenses against pests like the gypsy moth coupled with an abundance of undergraduate talent makes the U-M campus an ideal location for studies in insect chemical ecology Barbehenn said.
The protein study showed that gypsy moths would have to devour more maple leaves than oak leaves to achieve the same amount of nourishment.
But earlier work by Barbehenn and his students showed that the toxicity of maple leaves may prevent this strategy from working.
Trees play an impor tant role in tak ing up car bon diox ide from the atmos phere
--when decid u ous trees push out new growth after months of win ter dor mancy--from mod els that pre dict how car bon emis sions will impact global
spring bud burst mod el ing for exam ple a sin gle species of tree to rep re sent all the trees in a geo graphic region.
and his col leagues tested the model against a broader set of obser va tions col lected by the USA National Phe nol ogy Net work a nationwide tree ecol ogy mon
The team esti mated that com pared to the late 20th cen tury red maple bud burst will occur 8 to 40 days ear lier depend ing on the part of the coun try by the year 2100.
The researchers also eval u ated how warm ing tem per a tures could affect the bud burst date of dif fer ent species of tree.
They found that bud burst shifted to ear lier in the year in both early-budding trees such as com mon aspen (Pop u lus tremu loides)
and late-budding trees such as red maple (Acer rubrum) but that the effect was greater in the late-budding trees
The researchers noted that early bud burst may give decid u ous trees such as oaks
and maples a com pet i tive advan tage over ever green trees such as pines and hem locks.
With decid u ous trees grow ing for longer peri ods of the year they may begin to out strip growth of ever greens lead ing to last ing changes in for est make-up.
##Zoomable map of poplar proteins offers new view of bioenergy cropresearchers seeking to improve production of ethanol from woody crops have a new resource in the form of an extensive molecular map
of poplar tree proteins published by a team from the Department of energy's Oak ridge National Laboratory. Populus a fast-growing perennial tree holds potential as a bioenergy crop due to its ability to produce large amounts of biomass on nonagricultural land.
Now a study by ORNL scientists with the Department of energy's Bioenergy Science Center has provided the most comprehensive look to date at poplar's proteome the suite of proteins produced by a plant's cells.
The study is featured on the cover of January's Molecular and Cellular Proteomics. The ability to comprehensively measure genes and proteins helps us understand the range of molecular machinery that a plant uses to do its life functions said ORNL's Robert Hettich.
This can provide the information necessary to modify a metabolic process to do something specific such as altering the lignin content of a tree to make it better suited for biofuel production.
The ORNL research team measured more than 11000 proteins in different parts of poplar including mature leaves young leaves roots and stems.
Lead coauthors Paul Abraham and Richard Giannone describe how the atlas offers a broad overview of the poplar proteome
considering a plant such as poplar can potentially manufacture more than 40000 different proteins. Unlike an organism's genome which is the same for every cell
Or we can look at a tree that's very young versus one that's very old thus enabling us to understand how all these proteins are changing as a function of the tree growing older.
Knowing how plants change and adapt to environmental surroundings by altering their proteins could help bioenergy researchers develop poplar trees better suited to biofuel production.
It's the proteins that directly alter the morphology anatomy and function of a plant cell Abraham said.
But when trees are killed by natural disturbances such as fire drought or wind their decay also releases carbon back into the atmosphere making it critical to quantify tree mortality
in order to understand the role of forests in the global climate system. Tropical old-growth forests may play a large role in this absorption service yet tree mortality patterns for these forests are understood not well.
Now scientist Jeffrey Chambers and colleagues at the U s. Department of energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab have devised an analytical method that combines satellite images simulation modeling
To develop a better estimate of the contribution of forests we need to have a better understanding of forest tree mortality.
By linking data from Landsat satellite images over a 20-year period with observations on the ground they found that 9. 1 to 16.9 percent of tree mortality was missing from more conventional plot-based analyses of forests.
That equates to more than half a million dead trees each year that had previously been unaccounted for in studies of this region and
Trees and other living organisms are key players in the global carbon cycle a complex biogeochemical process in
Fewer trees mean not only a weakening of the forest's ability to absorb carbon but the decay of dead trees will also release carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.
Large-scale tree mortality in tropical ecosystems could thus act as a positive feedback mechanism accelerating the global warming effect.
The Amazon forest is hit periodically by fierce thunderstorms that may bring violent winds with concentrated bursts believed to be as high as 170 miles per hour.
which they assumed was due to damage to the canopy and thus tree loss. Researchers were sent then into the field at some of the blowdown areas to count the number of trees felled by the storm.
Looking at the satellite images pixel by pixel (with each pixel representing 900 square meters or about one-tenth of a football field) and matching them with on-the-ground observations they were able to draw a detailed mortality map for the entire landscape
Essentially they found that tree mortality is clustered in both time and space. It's not blowdown
Some areas have 80 percent of trees down some have 15 percent. In one particularly violent storm in 2005 a squall line more than 1000 miles long and 150 miles wide crossed the entire Amazon basin.
The researchers estimated that hundreds of millions of trees were destroyed potentially equivalent to a significant fraction of the estimated mean annual carbon accumulation for the Amazon forest.
Intense 100-year droughts also caused widespread tree mortality in the Amazon basin in 2005 and 2010.
This new tool can be used to assess tree mortality in other types of forests as well.
or severely damaged about 320 million trees. The carbonin those trees which would eventually be released into the atmosphere as CO2 as the trees decompose was about equal to the net amount of carbon absorbed by all U s. forests in a year.
Disturbances such as Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Katrina cause large impacts to the terrestrial carbon cycle forest tree mortality and CO2 emissions from decomposition in addition to significant economic impacts.
However these processes are currently not well represented in global climate models. A better understanding of tree mortality provides a path forward towards improving coupled earth system models Chambers said.
Besides understanding how forests affect carbon cycling the new technique could also play a vital role in understanding how climate change will affect forests.
and on the other hand a warming climate will likely accelerate tree mortality. So which of these processes will win out in the long-term:
Joseph Nichols a research associate in the center worked on the newly installed Sequoia IBM Bluegene/Q system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (LLNL) funded by the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program of the National
Sequoia once topped list of the world's most powerful supercomputers boasting 1572864 compute cores (processors)
Because of Sequoia's impressive numbers of cores Nichols was able to show for the first time that million-core fluid dynamics simulations are possible
Supercomputers like Sequoia divvy up the complex math into smaller parts so they can be computed simultaneously.
Sequoia is approximately 10 million times more powerful than that machine Nichols noted. The Stanford ties go deeper still.
Citrus trees infected with HLB also called citrus greening usually die within five to 10 years.
Fruit on infected trees often falls to the ground before harvest and fruit that remains on trees may become misshapen
Supervisory horticulturalist Elizabeth Baldwin with USDA's Agricultural research service (ARS) in Fort Pierce is investigating the effects of HLB on the taste of orange juice produced from diseased trees.
In general the researchers found more of a problem with off-flavored juice from diseased Hamlin orange trees than with diseased trees of the Valencia and Midsweet varieties.
#New control strategies for bipolar bark beetlespopulation explosions of pine beetles which have been decimating North american forests in recent decades may be prevented by boosting competitor
The Dartmouth-led study published in the January issue of the journal Population Ecology confirmed for the first time that the abundance of a certain animal species--in this case the southern pine beetle--fluctuates innately between extremes with no middle ground.
The pine beetles produce pheromones chemical signals that attract enough competitors and predators to prevent outbreaks says Sharon Martinson a member of the research team and first author on the new paper.
Leaving more dead trees in forests can provide habitat for competitor beetles that rarely kill tree
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