VCE's very own Kent McFarland, aka Kaptain Krummholz, has been honored as eBirder of the month for March. Kent's vision for eBird's value as a conservation tool, and his energy for creating the first state eBird portal, made him a slamdunk for this award. He is almost singlehandedly responsible for Vermont eBird's distinction as having the highest per capita number of checklist submissions. Congratulations, Kent!
Two U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists may have discovered "the map to El Dorado" for the American elm—a previously hidden population of elms that carry genes for resistance to Dutch elm disease. The disease kills individual branches and eventually the entire tree within one to several years. It has been accepted for 80 years that American elms (Ulmus americana) are tetraploids, trees with four copies of each chromosome. But there have also been persistent but dismissed rumors of trees that had fewer copies—triploids, which have three copies of chromosomes, or diploids, which have two copies.
Now botanist Alan T. Whittemore and geneticist Richard T. Olsen with USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) have proven beyond question that diploid American elms exist as a subset of elms in the wild. Their findings will be published in the April edition of the American Journal of Botany. Whittemore and Olsen work at the U.S. National Arboretum operated by ARS in Washington, D.C.
American elms once lined the country's streets and dominated eastern forests until they succumbed by the millions after Dutch elm disease arrived in the United States in 1931. Yet elms are still one of the most important tree crops for the $4.7 billion-a-year nursery industry, especially since the introduction of a very few new trees with some tolerance to the disease. American elms remain popular because of their stately beauty, their rapid leaf litter decay and their ability to stand up to city air pollution.
It was one of the disease-tolerant elm trees—Jefferson, released jointly by ARS and the National Park Service in 2005—that put Whittemore and Olsen on the trail of the diploid.
"Jefferson is a triploid. To get a triploid elm, we thought there had to be a diploid parent out there somewhere in the wild that had crossed with a tetraploid," said Whittemore.
To settle the question, the two scientists tested elm trees from across the species' eastern and central U.S. range. About 21 percent of the wild elms sampled were diploid; some grew in stands with tetraploids, while others were larger groupings of diploids.
The small amount of genetic data now available suggests that at least some tetraploid and diploid elm populations have diverged significantly from one another, which strengthens the possibility of the diploid trees having genes for disease resistance that the tetraploids don't have, Whittemore said.
"We can't say yet whether this is a distinct race of U. americana or if we are really talking about a separate species," he said. "That's a job we will tackle this summer."
Source: USDA press release by Kim Kaplan
This winter's deep snowpack and persistent cold have taken a toll on our roads, roofs and pysches. But humans aren't the only beings that struggle from day to day. Winter is a difficult time for wildlife, especially those that remain active, seeking food and cover through the short days and harsh conditions. In recent months, Vermont has experienced a pronounced increase in Barred Owl sightings, as these nocturnal predators struggle to hunt successfully for small mammalian prey under the deep snow. Reports of Barred Owls around the state have been numerous, with some sightings occurring in unexpected venues.
Listen to Vermont Public Radio's interview with VCE's Chris Rimmer and other bird experts around the state to learn more about this winter's Barred Owl phenomenon.
Please report any Barred Owl observations (and sightings of other birds) on Vermont eBird, which is coordinated by VCE. If you encounter a Barred Owl in distress, please contact the Vermont Institute of Natural Science's wildlife rehabilitation facility.
Photo: a Barred Owl in easier times, courtesy of Steve Faccio.
Yet today, there is evidence of alarming pollinator population declines worldwide. Fortunately, science investigators of this crucial issue can use data collected and organized in the Butterflies and Moths of North America (BAMONA) database to monitor the health of our butterfly and moth population.
Backed by more than 287,000 verified sighting records and 3,239 images that describe 4,638 species, BAMONA is committed to collecting and providing access to quality-controlled data about butterflies and moths of North America. Dedicated volunteer coordinators, including national and internationally recognized Lepidoptera experts, verify each record. VCE biologist, Kent McFarland, is the coordinator for Vermont. The goal is to fill the needs of scientists and nature observers by bringing verified occurrence and life history data into one accessible location.
To serve its broad range of users even better, BAMONA recently launched its re-tooled website. The site was developed at Montana State University (MSU) under a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) Network. VCE will soon be adding over 30,000 records from the Vermont Butterfly Survey to the BAMONA site.
BAMONA’s latest innovations are aimed at improving technologies for both data collection and data dissemination. Users can now submit records – which typically include a photograph – via the site’s new user submission form, replacing an outdated submission process that required multiple e-mails with spreadsheet attachments. As for data dissemination, verified records are now immediately available on the site’s home page. New, interactive Google-based maps enable the display of any verified sighting, including Canadian locations. Visitors can now zoom in or out and click on dots pin-pointing sighting locations on interactive maps, and see the details of each sighting record. All these features were not available previously.
For more information, go to www.butterfliesandmoths.org.
Butterflies, among the most familiar and showy of insects, are silent messengers of environmental health. They can speak volumes about the state of the environment under forces of changing land-use practices and other human-induced and natural pressures. In the last 200 years, Vermont and other areas in the Northeast have undergone both extensive and intensive landscape changes that have undoubtedly affected butterfly populations. Since 1950, for example, we have witnessed a 60 percent decline of hay fields, pasture lands and other grasslands in the Northeast due to loss and consolidation of farming and sprawl development. Unfortunately, we have few historic data with which to understand or evaluate changes that may have followed in butterfly populations.
Researchers already study how various species of plants and animals migrate in response to climate change. Now, Jason Samson, a PhD candidate in McGill University’s Department of Natural Resource Sciences, has taken the innovative step of using the same analytic tools to measure the impact of climate change on human populations. Samson and fellow researchers combined climate change data with censuses covering close to 97 per-cent of the world’s population in order to forecast potential changes in local populations for 2050. Samson’s team found that if populations continue to increase at the expected rates, those who are likely to be the most vulnerable to climate change are the people living in low-latitude, hot regions of the world, places like central South America, the Arabian Peninsula and much of Africa. In these areas, a relatively small increase in temperature will have serious consequences on a region’s ability to sustain a growing population.”It makes sense that the low latitude tropical regions should be more vulnerable because the people there already experience extremely hot conditions which make agriculture challenging. An increase in temperature over the next few decades will only make their lives more difficult in a variety of ways,” says Samson.
This contrasts with Samson’s predictions about the impact of climate change on human populations in the high-latitude more temperate zones of the world, where the temperature change is expected to be greater. Because the spread of human populations along with their activities are already more constrained by the cooler conditions in these regions, the researchers expect that climate change will have less of an impact on people living in these areas.
The study also points to clear inequities in the causes and consequences of climate change: the countries that have contributed the least to climate change, based on their average per-capita carbon dioxide emissions, are nevertheless predicted to be the most vulnerable to its impacts. “Take Somalia for instance,” suggests Samson.”Because it’s so hot there, it’s already very difficult to grow things, and it will only become more difficult if the temperature rises. It’s also clear that Somalia is not a big contributor of greenhouse gas to the atmosphere. Now thanks to this map, we have concrete quantitative evidence of the disparity between the causes and the consequences of climate change at a national level.”
Samson anticipates this data could be useful for decision makers around the world in the ongoing international negotiations around climate change.”
On online version of the article was recently published by the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography. For an abstract of the article: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1466-8238.2010.00632.x/abstract
