Environmental Research: Ecology最新文献

{"title":"Climate change effects on understory plant phenology: implications for large herbivore forage availability","authors":"Casey L. Brown, P. Coe, D. Clark, M. Wisdom, M. Rowland, Joshua P Averett, B. Johnson","doi":"10.1088/2752-664x/ac7fb0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1088/2752-664x/ac7fb0","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Consistent with a warming climate, the timing of key phenological phases (i.e., phenophases) for many plant species is shifting, but the direction and extent of these shifts remain unclear. For large herbivores such as ungulates, altered plant phenology can have important nutritional and demographic consequences. We used two multi-year datasets collected during 1992-1996 and 2015-2019 of understory plant phenology in semi-arid forested rangelands in northeastern Oregon, United States, to test whether the duration of phenophases for forage species has changed over time for three plant functional groups (forbs, graminoids, and shrubs). Duration of spring green-up was approximately two weeks shorter in the later years for forbs (19 ± 3.8 d) and graminoids (13.2 ± 2.8 d), and senescence was three weeks longer for graminoids (25.1 ± 5.1) and shrubs (22.0 ± 4.6). Average peak flowering date was 3.1 ± 0.2 d earlier per decade for understory forage species with approximately 1/3 of the species (35%) exhibiting earlier peak flowering dates over time. Variation in late-winter precipitation had the greatest effect on the duration of understory green-up, whereas variation in summer precipitation had a greater effect on duration of the senescent period. Collectively, these results indicate climate-related progression towards shorter periods of peak plant productivity, and earlier and longer periods of plant senescence, the combination of which substantially reduces the temporal window of forage available in growing forms most usable to herbivores. This work adds a needed component to the climate change literature, by describing links between shifting climate variables, multiple phases of understory plant phenology, and possible nutritional consequences for herbivores under a warming climate.","PeriodicalId":367648,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Research: Ecology","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117323983","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Large-scale variation in phytoplankton community composition of >1,000 lakes across the U.S.A.","authors":"J. Verspagen, X. Ji, Quan‐Xing Liu, J. Huisman","doi":"10.1088/2752-664x/ac788c","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1088/2752-664x/ac788c","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Although environmental impacts on the biodiversity and species composition of lakes have been studied in great detail at local and regional scales, unraveling the big picture of how lake communities respond to environmental variation across large spatial scales has received less attention. We performed a comprehensive analysis to assess how the phytoplankton community composition varies among >1,000 lakes across the conterminous United States of America. Our results show that lake-to-lake similarity in species composition was low even at the local scale, and slightly decreased with geographical distance. Analysis of the compositional data by Dirichlet regression revealed that the geographical variation in phytoplankton community composition was best explained by total phosphorus, water temperature, pH, and lake size. High total phosphorus concentrations were associated with high relative abundances of cyanobacteria and euglenophytes at the expense of other phytoplankton groups. High lake temperatures stimulated cyanobacteria, dinoflagellates, desmids and euglenophytes, whereas cryptophytes, golden algae and diatoms were relatively more abundant in colder lakes. Low lake pH correlated with high dissolved CO2 concentrations, which may explain why it benefitted phytoplankton groups with inefficient carbon concentrating mechanisms such as golden algae and euglenophytes. Conversely, the relative abundance of cyanobacteria showed a pronounced increase with lake pH. Large lakes showed higher relative abundances of cyanobacteria and diatoms, whereas small lakes showed higher relative abundances of chlorophytes, desmids, dinoflagellates and euglenophytes. Biodiversity increased with lake temperature, but decreased at high total phosphorus concentrations and pH. The key environmental variables identified by our study (high phosphorus loads, warm temperature, low pH) are associated with anthropogenic pressures such as eutrophication, global warming and rising atmospheric CO2 concentration. Hence, our results provide a comprehensive illustration of the major impact of these anthropogenic pressures on the biodiversity and taxonomic composition of lake phytoplankton communities.","PeriodicalId":367648,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Research: Ecology","volume":"241 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122819772","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Spartina alterniflora has the highest methane emissions in a St. Lawrence Estuary salt marsh","authors":"S. Comer-Warner, Sami Ullah, Wendy Ampuero Reyes, S. Krause, G. Chmura","doi":"10.1088/2752-664x/ac706a","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1088/2752-664x/ac706a","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Salt marshes have the ability to store large amounts of ‘blue carbon’, potentially mitigating some of the effects of climate change. Salt marsh carbon storage may be partially offset by emissions of CH4, a highly potent greenhouse gas (GHG). Sea level rise and invasive vegetation may cause shifts between different elevation and vegetation zones in salt marsh ecosystems. Elevation zones have distinct soil properties, plant traits and rhizosphere characteristics, which affect CH4 fluxes. We investigated differences in CH4 emissions between four elevation zones (mudflat, Spartina alterniflora, Spartina patens and invasive Phragmites australis) typical of salt marshes in the northern Northwest Atlantic. CH4 emissions were significantly higher from the S. alterniflora zone (17.7±9.7 mg C m-2 hr-1) compared to the other three zones, where emissions were negligible (< 0.3 mg C m-2 hr-1). These emissions were high for salt marshes and were similar to those typically found in oligohaline marshes with lower salinities. CH4 fluxes were significantly correlated with soil properties (salinity, water table depth (WTD), bulk density and temperature), plant traits (rhizome volume and biomass, root volume and dead biomass volume all at 0-15 cm) and CO2 fluxes. The relationships between CH4 emissions, and rhizome and root volume suggest that the aerenchyma tissues in these plants may be a major transport mechanism of CH4 from anoxic soils to the atmosphere. This may have major implications for the mitigation potential carbon sink from salt marshes globally, especially as S. alterniflora is widespread. This study shows CH4 fluxes can vary over orders of magnitude from different vegetation in the same system, therefore, specific emissions factors may need to be used in future climate models and for more accurate carbon budgeting depending on vegetation type.","PeriodicalId":367648,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Research: Ecology","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124023548","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Analysis of animal-related electric outages using species distribution models and community science data","authors":"Meichen Feng, Olukunle O. Owolabi, Toryn L. J. Schafer, Sanhita Sengupta, Lan Wang, D. Matteson, J. Che-Castaldo, D. Sunter","doi":"10.1088/2752-664x/ac7eb5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1088/2752-664x/ac7eb5","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Animal-related outages (AROs) are a prevalent form of outages in electrical distribution systems. Animal-infrastructure interactions vary across species and regions, underlining the need to study the animal-outage relationship in more species and diverse systems. Animal activity has been an indicator of reliability in the electrical grid system by describing temporal patterns in AROs. However, these ARO models have been limited by a lack of available species activity data, instead approximating activity based on seasonal patterns and weather dependency in ARO records and characteristics of broad taxonomic groups, e.g., squirrels. We highlight available resources to fill the ecological data gap limiting joint analyses between ecology and energy sectors. Species distribution modeling (SDM), a common technique to model the distribution of a species across geographic space and time, paired with community science data, provided us with species-specific estimates of activity to analyze alongside spatio-temporal patterns of ARO severity. We use SDM estimates of activity for multiple outage-prone bird species to examine whether diverse animal activity patterns were important predictors of ARO severity by capturing existing variation within animal-outage relationships. Low dimensional representation and single patterns of bird activity were important predictors of ARO severity in Massachusetts. However, both patterns of summer migrants and overwintering species showed some degree of importance, indicating that multiple biological patterns could be considered in future models of grid reliability. Making the best available resources from quantitative ecology known to outside disciplines can allow for more interdisciplinary data analyses between ecological and non-ecological systems. This can result in further opportunities to examine and validate the relationships between animal activity and grid reliability in diverse systems.","PeriodicalId":367648,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Research: Ecology","volume":"157 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124032780","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Spatially explicit simulation of deforestation using the Ising-like neutral model","authors":"T. Stepinski","doi":"10.1088/2752-664X/acdbd2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1088/2752-664X/acdbd2","url":null,"abstract":"Deforestation is a prominent example of anthropogenic land change. Here we investigate deforestation from a landscape ecology perspective by process-based modeling of a sequence of consecutive landscape patterns starting from a homogeneous forest and ending in homogeneous agricultural land. We propose an Ising-like neutral model to mimic the deforestation dynamics. Our goal is to demonstrate that such a simple conceptualization of the deforestation process is capable of simulating an evolutionary sequence of landscape patterns matching empirical data. The model has only two parameters, one representing an external pressure (for or against deforestation), and another representing a propensity of land for spatial autocorrelation. We perform a suite of simulations to link a process, as parameterized by the values of the two parameters, to the sequence of landscape patterns. We have found a narrow range of parameters for which the model quantitatively and visually matches empirical data. This indicates that the Ising-like neutral model captures the essential aspects of a deforestation process and that the temporal sequence of intermediate landscape patterns does not depend on the details of the process.","PeriodicalId":367648,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Research: Ecology","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126311117","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}