Marathon Finish for Fitzpatrick
Associate Professor Ben Fitzpatrick placed sixth in the Covenant Health Knoxville Marathon on Sunday! His time was 2:58:12. Congratulations, Ben!
by armsworth
Associate Professor Ben Fitzpatrick placed sixth in the Covenant Health Knoxville Marathon on Sunday! His time was 2:58:12. Congratulations, Ben!
by armsworth
Premal Shah, a PhD student who graduated from EEB in 2011, is now an Assistant Professor of Genetics at Rutgers University, as of January 2016. Congratulations!
by armsworth
Jeff Martin will join the Department on 11 April 2015 as the new greenhouse manager.
Jeff received his B.S. From Clemson University in horticulture and has a masters degree in Plant Science from UTK, with a minor in entomology. He has experience with growing a variety of wild, horticultural, and crop plants under greenhouse, garden, and farm conditions (Atlanta Botanical Garden, Clemson Research Greenhouses, AmeriCorp, UT Organic Unit greenhouses and fields) and has experience both in staff management and in working with research faculty, students, volunteers and the public in these diverse settings. As an AmeriCorp volunteer conducted community outreach education, mentoring programs for the public and for at risk youth centered on gardening, and taught K-12 afterschool programs on nutrition, ecology and gardening. Jeff has training in pest management (conventional and IMP with beneficials), plant propagation, and has handled budget, timetable and spreadsheets. The Division of Biology can look forward to working with him in the near future.
by armsworth
Professor Susan Riechert has received the 2016 SEC Faculty Achievement Award! The SEC award recognizes professors from the fourteen Southeastern Conference schools with outstanding records in teaching and scholarship. Honorees from each university receive a $5,000 honorarium and become their university’s nominee for the SEC Professor of the Year award. To view the full press release, click here.
http://tntoday.utk.edu/2016/03/30/riechert-receives-2016-sec-faculty-achievement-award/
by armsworth
Jayne Lampley (Schilling Lab) is one of just 26 graduate students across UT who have received a 2016 Summer Graduate Research Assistantship from The Office of Research and Engagement. The GRAs are funded by the Scholarly and Research Incentive Funds. Selected faculty projects receive $3,600 in support of student stipends for work completed during the summer.
Her project is called “Analysis of an Evolutionary Radiation in Trillium.”
Congratulations!
by armsworth
Prof. Joe Williams is the organizer of a special issue of the American Journal of Botany and lead author on the cover paper.
The issue also features a paper from Joe that has two undergraduate alumni co-authors (Jacob A. Edwards and Adam J. Ramsey), both now in graduate schools elsewhere. The work was completed while they were students at UT.
Congratulations!
by armsworth
“Zebra Mussels, Zika, Kudzu, and More: Winning the War Against the Aliens Among Us”
McClung Museum Auditorium, 1327 Circle Park Drive, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN
Wednesday, March 2nd, 2016 @7 pm (Reception and Snacks @ 6 pm)
As part of National Invasive Species Awareness Week (www.nisaw.org), pioneering invasion biologist Daniel Simberloff will discuss current regional invasive species issues. Simberloff, the Gore Hunger Professor of Environmental Science, will highlight notable local invaders and the ecological impacts they pose, cover current efforts to stem their spread, and describe ways for the public to join this fight.
For more information, read the press release.
by armsworth
A March 1 article in the UT Daily Beacon fights the granola-crunching stereotype of the EEB major and explains why studying Ecology and Evolutionary Biology is so important, whether you want to be a doctor, a conservationist, or an informed citizen.
“Ecology majors battle hippie stereotypes for science” by Heiler Meek, Staff Writer
by armsworth
Alumna Sara Kuebbing (PhD 2014) has been awarded a Smith Fellowship from the Society of Conservation Biology. The prestigious David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellowship Program seeks to develop future world leaders and entrepreneurs who are successful at linking conservation science and application. Congratulations, Sara!
From the press release:
The Smith Fellowship, the nation’s premier postdoctoral program in conservation science, seeks to find solutions to the most pressing conservation challenges in the United States. Each Fellow’s research is conducted in partnership with a major academic institution and an “on the ground” conservation organization to help bridge the gap between theory and application.
Emerging from an impressive pool of Ph.D. applicants from around the world who competed for the Fellowship are five outstanding scientists who will comprise the David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellowship class of 2016:
…
Sara Kuebbing will complete a project titled, “Invasion Treadmills: mechanisms that promote reinvasion of sites after removal of nonnative species” under the academic mentorship of Dr. Mark Bradford at Yale University and working in partnership with Drs. John Randall and Kris Serbesoff-King of The Nature Conservancy.
…
While the Fellows’ research projects focus on urgent conservation issues, they also learn firsthand the challenges and rewards of conservation applications. The program’s focus is to enlarge their professional opportunities and ensure future success by helping them build relationships in the conservation and research communities and by providing opportunities for professional development through targeted workshops and training events.
The fellowship is named after the late Dr. David H. Smith, founder of the Cedar Tree Foundation, and pediatrician, inventor and conservationist.
The Smith Fellowship seeks to identify and support early-career scientists who will shape the growth of applied conservation biology. It’s also an opportunity for scientists to develop solutions to critical environmental challenges, said Dr. Michael P. Dombeck, executive director of the Smith Fellows program and former chief of the United States Forest Service.
“The Smith Fellowship enables young scientists to improve and expand their research skills and direct their research efforts toward problems of pressing conservation concern, to bridge the gap between research and application,” Dombeck said.
by armsworth
(View the related Tennessee Today press release.)
Newly discovered much earlier reproduction of this forest pest may explain why it is invasive, reveal why control has failed, and impede future control.
A sap-feeding insect native to Asia, the hemlock woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae) or HWA was first found in 1951 in eastern North America, where it has since devastated native hemlock populations. HWA does not kill hemlocks in its native range, and why it devastates hemlocks in eastern North America has not been determined.
Like its aphid relatives, HWA has a complex life cycle. Reproduction alternates through several sexual and asexual generations. Each generation is made up of a variety of life forms. Completing two generations each year on hemlock, adults lay eggs that hatch from March through June, then develop though four stages before they mature and lay eggs that hatch from May through July. Until now, scientists documented HWA eggs hatching only from March through July.
The newly documented activity occurred in eastern Tennessee during and after record high temperatures, attributed to global climate change and El Niño conditions, where December’s average mean was 53°F with 14 days at least 65°F. Although not proven to be the reason for this newly documented HWA activity, temperature likely contributed in some way. Temperature influences the rate of insect development, distribution, and abundance. Higher temperatures shorten life cycle stages, sometimes increasing the number of generations each year. More generations create more offspring and may increase insect populations. Alternatively, insect populations may crash when put out of sync with their hosts or when they develop new interactions preventing their survival.
When University of Tennessee researchers Christy Leppanen and Daniel Simberloff discovered eggs hatching in December, they followed populations and determined that this winter’s HWA populations reproduced earlier and more quickly than previously documented.
Reproduction outside of recognized cycles can counteract management because control relies on accurate predictions of pest reproduction, knowing what life stages are present when, so they can be targeted at the most effective times. We are caught by surprise when pests break the rules.
“We visit only a few locations out of the introduced range that extends from Georgia to Maine and couldn’t have been so lucky to happen across the first instance of early winter reproduction,” Leppanen said. “This likely occurred before, possibly increasing populations at times or in numbers that overwhelmed existing population controls, including beetles deliberately introduced to eat them, and contributed to HWA’s escalation from ‘introduced’ to ‘invasive’ in the East.”
Events like this challenge current HWA control focused on matching natural enemies like the introduced beetles with HWA population cycles. Control using natural enemies has not yet proven successful, possibly because HWA reproduction has not been sufficiently synchronized with enemies able to respond in time, place, and densities necessary to reduce HWA populations. And while earlier reproduction that occurs regularly is predictable, reproduction on the fly in response to changing conditions, such as temperature fluctuations, is difficult to anticipate. So, the frequency and regularity of “extragenerational” reproduction must be understood.
After their discovery, Leppanen sent a mass email to a group of HWA researchers and managers on December 31, 2015, New Year’s Eve. An immediate response came via dozens of “Out of Office” replies. Simberloff asks, “Could similar events in other years have gone unrecorded because HWA life cycles were not synchronized with researcher activity periods?”
Dr. Christy Leppanen is a Postdoctoral Research Associate working in the laboratory of Dr. Daniel Simberloff, the Nancy Gore Hunger Professor of Environmental Studies, in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee.