The complete study and abstract are available on the ASHS Horttechnology electronic journal web site: http://horttech. ashspublications. org/content/23/5/668. abstractstory Source:
Such places including the street trees and other vegetation that characterize these spaces are important for meeting the community
and nut species including common apple (Malus domestica) Chinese chestnut (Castanea mollissima) European or sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa) ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) European plum (Prunus domestica) and European pear (Pyrus communis).
For example Chinese immigrants sought ginkgo nuts (G. biloba) in Baltimore New york and Philadelphia; African-americans in Baltimore and Philadelphia foraged young pokeweed shoots (Phytolacca americana;
The Seattle Parks and Recreation Department is actively seeking to rehabilitate former apple orchards in city parks trees that it had neglected for decades.
Savannas--grasslands dotted with trees--cover about 20 percent of Earth's land and play a critical role in storing atmospheric carbon says Dr. William Hoffmann associate professor of plant
We wanted to find out what controls savanna vegetation--essentially the density of trees within the savanna
We found that the rules determining tree density are fundamentally different among the three continents studied--Africa Australia and South america.
They found that tree density was influenced by a number of different factors including moisture availability temperature soil fertility and frequency of fires.
For example greater moisture availability--a combination of rainfall rainfall seasonality and drought indices--meant greater tree density in Africa
and Australia but it had almost no relationship with tree density in South america Hoffmann said.
Not surprisingly he added the study showed that fire reduces tree density. But the researchers found some strong counter-intuitive relationships between rainfall
The researchers also modeled what would happen to tree density if the mean annual temperature increased by 4 degrees Celsius.
Because tree density is controlled differently on the three continents the study predicts different responses to global warming.
In Africa tree density is predicted to climb in hotter temperatures while it is expected to decline in Australia and Africa.
valos and her Stony Brook University students generated the evolutionary hypotheses evolutionary trees and tests of selection reported in the study;
Finally they studied the engineering results across hundreds of evolutionary trees of the bats to uncover the three optimal snout shapes favored by natural selection.
By coupling a flexible engineering model with analyses based upon evolutionary trees the study opens the possibility of discovering evidence for selection in other very diverse organisms
It also highlights the growing role of evolutionary trees in testing longstanding hypotheses on adaptation that could not be tested even ten years ago and certainly not without the engineering model.
Growers should see steady profit through years 10-12 when the tree starts to decline in the South.
The budget plans included prices of pest sprays tree costs fuel repairs and more. Morgan presented her paper last summer at the Proceedings of the Florida State Horticultural Society
the same cells that die in MS lesions says Jennifer Linden of Weill Cornell Medical College who presented the research.
and in particular epsilon toxin may play a role in triggering MS. Late last year Linden
and produces the epsilon toxin) in a 21-year-old woman who was experiencing a flare-up of her MS. To further test their hypothesis Linden
but not fully understood says Linden. They also tested samples of local foods for the presence of C. perfringens and the toxin gene.
Linden says these findings are important because if it can be confirmed that epsilon toxin is indeed a trigger of MS development of a neutralizing antibody
coffee; and vitamins or other supplements. More than 71 percent of people surveyed said that they heard moderate or high levels of contradictory information about nutrition.
The accuracy rate means growers can use the model to know well before harvest how much fruit is on their trees Lee said.
Traditionally growers have estimated crop yields on the number of boxes they believe their mature citrus trees can produce based on years of experience examining their groves Lee said.
The U s. Department of agriculture also publishes a monthly crop yield estimate based on examining tree sizes at select locations around the state
In smaller groves it's possible to photograph every tree Lee said. But for those that span thousands of acres operators would photograph trees in representative parts of the grove
and use the results to make projections. For now Lee said he and one of his graduate students are working on developing the self-running machine vision system that growers want.
much as a pine cone opens as it dries or a freshly fallen leaf curls and then straightens
the most common and aggressive malignant brain tumor has been launched by researchers at Cedars-Sinai's Department of Neurosurgery Johnnie L. Cochran Jr.
and grown in the laboratory before being injected under the skin as a vaccine weekly for four weeks and then once every two months according to Jeremy Rudnick MD neuro-oncologist in the Cedars-Sinai Department of Neurosurgery
The cancer stem cell study is the latest evolution in Cedars-Sinai's history of dendritic cell vaccine research
Cedars-Sinai's brain cancer stem cell study is open to patients whose glioblastoma multiforme has returned following surgical removal.
For more information call 1-800-CEDARS-1 or contact Cherry Sanchez by phone at 310-423-8100 or email cherry. sanchez@cshs. org. Story Source:
The above story is provided based on materials by Cedars-Sinai Medical center. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length h
Unlike the two-toed sloth--which is shall we say less restrictive in its choice of latrine--the three-toed sloths creep down trees every eight days or so to the base of their tree.
Then it's back up the tree in an achingly sluggish climb. The fastidious ritual--nearly the only reason a sloth leaves the limbs of just a few trees--may be the leading cause of death among the sloths.
More than half the deaths Pauli and collaborators documented during field research came at the claws
Previous explanations for the sloth's dangerous choice included communication with other sloths and a gracious gift of fertilizer to the just one or two trees a three-toed sloth calls home.
The moth larvae then eat their way out of the sloth waste emerging as moths that flutter back up into the tree overhead.
Judging from their diet--which is all leaves from the tree they live in--they shouldn't be able to maintain even the slow lifestyle that makes them
and a seemingly oversized tree-confined mammal need each other to get along. There's some grandeur in these systems of mutualism he says.
#Integrating vegetation into sustainable transportation planning may benefit public healthstrategic placement of trees and plants near busy roadways may enhance air quality and positively impact public health.
Scientists in the group have conducted research using field studies air quality modeling of pollutant transport and deposition in roadside vegetative barriers and tree performance studies.
Allergy shots can be customized to provide relief to multiple allergens including tree grass weed mold house dust dander and mold while offering the assurance of more than 100 years of experience in causing remission not just symptom
and trees that flourish in charred ground we found evidence that this particular fire was followed by the growth of fruit trees.
One of the major indicators of human action in the rainforest is the sheer prevalence of fast-growing'weed'trees such as Macaranga Celtis and Trema.
Nearer to the Borneo coastline the New guinea Sago palm first appeared over 10000 years ago. This would have involved a voyage of more than 2200km from its native New guinea
How a South american tree adapts to volcanic soilssoils of southern South america including Patagonia have endured a high frequency of disturbances from volcanic eruptions earthquakes landslides and erosion.
According to a recent article published in the American Journal of Botany scientists have identified a mechanism enabling a native tree species access to this limiting nutrient.
As a result the Chilean fire bush (Proteaceae Embothrium coccineum) a tree endemic to Chile and Argentina could have an important role in the reforestation of Patagonia.
In the wild E. coccineum colonizes highly disturbed land where other tree species rarely occur.
We studied the engineering results using the evolutionary tree which is a very cool new thing about this work.
Analyzing the engineering results over hundreds of evolutionary trees of New world leaf-nosed bats revealed three optimal snout shapes favored by natural selection they report.
because trees and the fungi associated with their roots break down rocks and minerals in the soil to get nutrients for growth.
when the CO2Â concentration was low â#at about 200 parts per million (ppm) â#trees
which could have reduced the rate of CO2Â removal from the atmosphere. â#oewe recreated past environmental conditions by growing trees at low present-day and high levels of CO2Â in controlled-environment growth chambersâ#says Quirk
and assess how they were broken down and weathered by the fungi associated with the roots of the trees. â#As reported in Biogeosciences the researchers found that low atmospheric CO2Â acts as a â#carbon starvationâ##brake.
The weathering rates by trees and fungi drop because low CO2Â reduces plantsâ##ability to perform photosynthesis meaning less carbon-energy is supplied to the roots and their fungi.
because trees and fungi broke down minerals at low rates at those concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. â#oeit is important that we understand the processes that affect
#Increase in hemlock forest offsetting effect of invasive hemlock woolly adelgid for nowdespite the accumulating destruction of a nonnative invasive insect called the hemlock woolly adelgid hemlock forests in the eastern United states appear to have held their own
In many regions particularly in the southern Appalachians the loss of hemlock to hemlock woolly adgid has been devastating.
However when Forest Service scientists used regional Forest Inventory & Analysis (FIA) data to get a big picture view of the status of hemlock in the eastern U s. the results surprised them.
In analyzing FIA data from the 1950s through 2007 we expected to see a more pronounced impact on hemlock stands according to Trotter.
The data suggests that increasing tree density associated with the past century of reforestation and succession in the eastern U s. may have offset the negative impacts of the adelgid at the regional scale.
The study Changes in the regional abundance of hemlock associated with the invasion of hemlock woolly adelgid was published recently in the journal Biological Invasions.
A native of Japan the hemlock woolly adelgid was detected first In virginia in the 1950s and for decades remained a primarily urban pest.
when the effects of infestation began to be evident in forestland within the tree's native range.
Hemlock's native range forms a triangle from northern Georgia and South carolina through the Appalachian mountains into Pennsylvania Canada and Minnesota.
Hemlock trees in the United states do not have natural defenses against hemlock woolly adelgid which coupled with a lack of natural predators has resulted in high levels of tree mortality in the 18 states where it is known to have spread particularly in southern states.
Trotter believes that this study which is based on forest data through 2007 may have caught hemlock at a tipping point in the balance between losses from hemlock woolly adelgid and increases due to forest regrowth.
Repeating this analysis as new FIA data becomes available may show if we are beyond a tipping point
and are now losing hemlock Trotter said. Even if there were continued increases in hemlock abundance in northern climates where cold temperatures slow damages from hemlock woolly adelgid the loss of trees in the south is a loss to the species Trotter said.
Losing trees in the South results in less genetic variation for hemlock he said. Nonnative forest insects like the hemlock woolly adelgid are devastating on many levels
because trees are so important to a region's culture and economy said Michael T. Rains Director of the U s. Forest Service's Northern Research Station
and the Forest Products Lab. Forest Service research is working hard to more aggressively control nonnative insects
and make our forests healthier and more resistant to these disturbances. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by USDA Forest Service-Northern Research Station.
#One tree likes seabird poop, next prefers fresh airoff the west coast of Peru seabirds deposit thick layers of guano that accumulates on the ground because of the lack of rain.
Now researchers from Wageningen University and Southern Illinois University revealed the effects of guano on the native trees of the arid coasts of South america.
Researchers found that non-nitrogen fixing trees become more abundant closer to sea replacing the usually more abundant nitrogen fixing trees in these deserts.
We think this is related to the positive effect of marine nutrients on non-nitrogen fixing trees explains Gilles Havik a former master student at Wageningen University
Nutrients are limiting in the desert so this input from the sea through the nitrogen-rich guano has a positive effect for trees that cannot fix nitrogen.
What we found very striking is that trees that do fix nitrogen from the air do not seem to benefit from nutrients coming from the sea
Tracking an alien invader of conker trees using people poweran army of citizen scientists has helped the professionals understand how a tiny'alien'moth is attacking the UK's conker (horse-chestnut trees
The caterpillars of the moth'tunnel'through the leaves of conker trees causing them to turn brown and autumnal in appearance even in the height of summer.
In 2010 thousands of'citizen scientists'were asked by two professional ecologists to collect records of leaf damage from across the country as part of a project called'Conker Tree Science'.
Investigating the data further the scientific team concluded that it takes just three years from the first sighting of the moth in a particular location to maximum levels of damage to the horse-chestnut trees being recorded.
Unlike some other citizen science projects that use biological records submitted by members of the public for long-term monitoring the Conker Tree Science project set out to test two specific hypotheses over the course of a year.
Conker Tree Science was run with funding from the Natural Environment Research Council and begun when the two authors were at the University of Bristol.
and insects would have an effect on the tree species'said Professor Rob Freckleton of Sheffield University who co-led the study.'
No magic bullet for coffee rust eradicationspraying fungicide to kill coffee rust disease which has ravaged Latin american plantations
Instead management practices focused on maintaining the complex web of ecological interactions among coffee plantation organisms--including insects fungi plants birds
and bats--are much more likely to succeed in the long run according to the U-M researchers who provide an overview of the recent Latin american coffee rust epidemic in a paper published online Jan 22 in the journal Bioscience.
Coffee rust is a fungus but spraying fungicides to kill it may inadvertently destroy natural fungal enemies of coffee rust that help to keep it in check.
And the ongoing abandonment of traditional shade-growing techniques in which coffee is grown beneath a canopy of trees likely reduces the diversity
and abundance of beneficial insects and opens the plantations to winds that help disperse coffee rust spores according to U-M ecologist John Vandermeer
and his co-authors Ivette Perfecto and Doug Jackson. Small seemingly trivial changes in environmental conditions can generate dramatic shifts in the underlying dynamics of the disease the researchers wrote.
what has been effectively autonomous biological control of coffee rust. A movement back toward more shaded systems with minimal application of agrochemicals might be an appropriate recommendation for coffee farmers in the region.
Vandermeer is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and at the School of Natural resources and Environment.
Vandermeer and Perfecto have operated research plots at an organic coffee plantation in southern Chiapas Mexico for about 16 years.
Last year more than 60 percent of the coffee plants there experienced more than 80 percent defoliation due to coffee rust fungus
The recent coffee rust epidemic damaged plantations from Mexico to Peru and applying fungicide is one of the main control methods promoted in the affected countries.
which is known to attack coffee rust. If conventional disease control methods alone are used to address the coffee rust problem the disease may prove to be intractable in Latin america according to the authors.
It's even possible that coffee rust will maintain its epidemic status indefinitely in the region though additional research would be required to determine
if that is likely to happen. Coffee rust threatens the livelihoods of millions of farmers and will potentially distort the economies of many of the world's most vulnerable nations according to Vandermeer and his colleagues.
It is reasonable to suggest that the situation calls for a revitalization of what pest control specialists have come to call'autonomous pest control.'
These included tree-dwelling carnivorous mammals who may have posed a threat to hoatzin nestlings which are raised in open nests.
In Africa by contrast similar tree-dwelling carnivorous mammals are shown to have existed much later. Digestion specialist and climbing artistthe present-day Hoatzin exhibits a special mode of digestion.
which enable the hatchlings to climb trees. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural history Museum.
and a majority of plants including all trees). The new study shows that this fertilizing effect will help offset other impacts of climate change.
but this time with many new kinds of flowering plants that are familiar to us today such as birches maples and many others.
#Oldest trees are growing faster, storing more carbon as they agein a finding that overturns the conventional view that large old trees are unproductive scientists have determined that for most species the biggest trees increase their growth rates
and sequester more carbon as they age. In a letter published today in the journal Nature an international research group reports that 97 percent of 403 tropical and temperate species grow more quickly the older they get.
Their conclusions are repeated based on measurements of 673046 individual trees some going back more than 80 years. This study would not have been said possible Harmon without long-term records of individual tree growth.
It was remarkable how we were able to examine this question on a global level thanks to the sustained efforts of many programs and individuals.
Extraordinary growth of some species such as Australian mountain ash--also known as eucalyptus--(Eucalyptus regnans) and the coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) is limited not to a few species the researchers said.
Rather rapid growth in giant trees is the global norm and can exceed 600 kg (1300 pounds) per year in the largest individuals they wrote.
Researchers measured growth in Douglas-fir western hemlock Sitka spruce western red cedar and silver fir. The National Science Foundation and the Pacific Northwest Research Station of the USDA Forest Service provided funding.
They measured growth in about 495 tree species. CTFS does very important work facilitating collaboration between forest ecologists worldwide
and therefore enabling us to gain a better insight into the growth of trees and forests Thomas said.
While the finding applies to individual trees it may not hold true for stands of trees the authors cautioned.
As they age some trees in a stand will die resulting in fewer individuals in a given area over time.
The ability to authenticate premium and rare varieties would encourage growers to maintain cacao biodiversity rather than depend on the most abundant and easiest to grow trees.
and coffee but those methods aren't suitable for cacao beans. Zhang's team wanted to address this challenge.
#Ants protect acacia plants against pathogensthe biological term symbiosis refers to what economists and politicians usually call a win-win situation:
The mutualistic association between acacia plants and the ants that live on them is an excellent example:
The acacia species Acacia hindsii which is native to tropical dry forests in Central america is such a myrmecophyte.
The acacia also provides shelter the so-called domatia in the hollows of its swollen thorns.
They compared the leaves of acacia plants which were inhabited by either mutualistic or parasitic ants to leaves from
Intriguingly the leaves of acacia colonized by parasitic ants showed more leaf damage from herbivores
Because acacia leaves are touched mainly by ants'legs she extracted the legs of mutualistic and parasitic ants and tested the effect of the extracts on the growth of bacterial pathogens in the lab. Plant pathogen Pseudomonas syringae was sensitive to the application of leg extracts of both ant species
In lab tests bacterial strains of the genera Bacillus Lactococcus Pantoea and Burkholderia effectively inhibited the growth of Pseudomonas bacteria isolated from infected acacia leaves.
or extreme hybrid beverage rich in local ingredients including honey bog cranberry lingonberry bog myrtle yarrow juniper birch tree resin
It's made from barley honey juniper and other herbs like those in the ancient version.
and educators alike recalls Cornell's Ritch C. Savin-Williams professor of human development licensed clinical psychologist author
We should have known something was amiss Savin-Williams said. One clue was that most of the kids who first claimed to have artificial limbs miraculously regrew arms
Savin-Williams and Kara Joyner of Bowling green State university co-authored a recent essay in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior titled The Dubious Assessment of Gay Lesbian
Over the years analyzing Add Health's sexual-orientation data became a cottage industry for scholars of human sexuality--Savin-Williams among them.
We offer this essay with data to forestall such wrongheaded scholarly work in the future Savin-Williams
Joyner and Savin-Williams offered three hypotheses for the gay-gone-straight phenomenon: Perhaps many of the self-reporting nonheterosexuals went back in the closet as they aged.
Joyner and Savin-Williams quickly dismissed the first hypothesis saying that notion is inconsistent with
Gay high school youth in such numbers do not become closeted during young adulthood Savin-Williams noted.
We're guessing Savin-Williams says that some research subjects ultimately understood the message that they said:'
I can take a joke as well as the next academic says Savin-Williams who has spent a lifetime studying adolescent development.
and adequately represent their lives Savin-Williams said. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Cornell University.
#And that is how the desert locust lost its memorythe desert locust (a type of grasshopper) much like Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde goes from being an innocuous solitary-living individual to become a voracious gregarious animal
and Swidbert Ott from the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciã ncia in Portugal and the University of Cambridge as they reveal that the locust'solitarious
The work out in Current Biology looked into the mechanism that allowed gregarious locusts to change their diet surprisingly fast--just a few hours after solitarious locusts are crowded they are eating toxic plants
To Simå es and colleagues'surprise it was found that this was due to an incapacity by newly gregarious locusts to acquire negative/aversive memories that made them on encountering toxic plants see these as appetitive.
Most importantly to understand better how the desert locust adapts is to get a step closer to find a way to stop the swarms that every year endanger as much as 10%of the world food resources.
Locusts in the wild tend to live solitary lives until it rains and enough food becomes available to trigger their multiplication.
and physical contact with other locusts as result of their crowding triggers a cascade of metabolic and behavioral changes that lead to their transformation into the gregarious form that goes to form the swarms.
and its protection against predators (toxic plants make locusts unpalatable) how could such major adaptation occur in just a few hours?
and colleagues exploited the locust's ability to associate an odour with a reward--which in the wild allows it to make quick food choices--to study the memory
and learning abilities of its three stages/forms--solitarious gregarious and transiens (an intermediate stage when locusts only just started to aggregate
They used a protocol similar to the one in Pavlov's dog experiments (where a dog is conditioned to associate a bell with being fed) using vanilla (the locusts'favourite) and lemon odours.
But in this case the locusts were taught to link a vanilla odour with unpalatable nicotine food (so with a negative/aversive stimulus) or instead lemon with a nutritious diet (positive stimulus).
) Since locusts prefer the smell of vanilla to lemon if after training they chose lemon the conditioning had been successful.
--while solitarious and gregarious locusts had no problem gaining negative memories (so being conditioned to link vanilla to the unpalatable diet)
although it took much longer to gregarious animals transiens locusts could not do it. In contrast all 3 stages gained without problems the positive/appetitive memories (to link the lemon odour to nutritious food.
This showed that during the locusts'initial period of gregarization/crowding (transiens form) the animals can not acquire new negative memories.
While both solitarious and gregarious locusts can do it they seem nevertheless to use different learning mechanisms as revealed by the different times it takes them to gain the aversive memory (4 hours for solitarious locusts and 24 hours for the gregarious).
These are interesting results but they still did not explain how the gregarious animals changed their diet so fast.
So next Simå es and colleagues used hyoscyamine--a toxic alkaloid substance present in plants of the locust's natural habitat that are avoided by solitarious forms (because of their bad taste)
The idea was to see how these preferences would now affect the locusts'training. To start the animals were taught to associate vanilla with hyoscyamine
but this time while solitarious locusts learned to avoid vanilla--so gained the negative memory--neither transiens nor gregarious locusts could do it.
To test for this possibility the researchers used a slightly different protocol--solitarious locusts were trained to associate hyoscyamine not with a vanilla but with the lemon odour.
since locusts normally chose vanilla they will only go for lemon if hyoscyamine has a strong appetitive value.
So all locusts are double trained but only half are crowded between the two training episodes.
Remarkably now the majority of transiens locusts (so those that have been crowded) chose lemon over vanilla in comparison with only one third of solitarious non-crowded locusts showing that they in fact see hyoscyamine as appetitive.
when locusts are exposed re to the toxic plants. This capacity to override previous memories which only occurs during the initial stages of gregarization/crowding is crucial for survival in the swarm because with increasing numbers of individuals also raises not only competition for food but also exposure to predators.
The reason why later gregarious locusts continue to eat toxic plants despite being able to gain aversive memories lies in their learning mechanism.
In fact while solitarious locusts acquire aversive memories in about 4 hours most probably through a taste-controlled mechanism gregarious animals take 24 hours to show a reaction
Transiens locusts appear to have none of these two mechanisms since they simply do not acquire new negative memories suggesting that they are even more resilient to toxicity than gregarious.
And when we think that a swarm of desert locusts can reach 1200 square kilometres with 40 to 80 million individuals per square kilometre
Luckily swarms only last days with those locusts not eaten by predators turning back to their solitarious form.
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