Read the article here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0293092
Protected areas are critical to mitigating extinction of species; however, they may also be in conflict with efforts to feed the growing human population.
Paul Armsworth, professor of ecology and researcher with the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) is the co-author of a new study showing croplands are prevalent in protected areas, which challenges their efficacy meeting conversation goals. Varsha Vijay, a researcher at the University of Maryland’s National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) is the lead author.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that 6% of all global terrestrial protected areas are already made up of cropland, a heavily modified habitat that is often not suitable for supporting wildlife. Worse, 22% of this cropland occurs in areas supposedly enjoying the strictest levels of protection, the keystone of global biodiversity protection efforts.
In order to comprehensively examine global cropland impacts in protected areas for the first time, the authors synthesized a number of remotely sensed cropland estimates and diverse socio-environmental datasets.
Read more about the study at sesync.org.
Kenneth McFarland, emeritus greenhouse manager and lecturer in the UT Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, recently co-authored a paper in Frontiers in Plant Science titled “Population Genomics and Phylogeography of a Clonal Bryophyte With Spatially Separated Sexes and Extreme Sex Ratios.”
Sexual reproduction plays an essential role in species’ survival and maintenance. Clonality and other forms of asexual reproduction, however, also exist, especially in plants.
In their study, researchers focused on the southern Appalachian clonal hornwort, Nothoceros aenigmaticus, which grows on rocks near or submerged in streams in watersheds of the Tennessee and Alabama Rivers. This hornwort is a good example of a plant that reproduces asexually and clonally as its male plants seem to produce non-functional sperm cells. It is distributed in southern Appalachia, Mexico, and in “alpine” regions of tropical South America.
“Early bryophyte taxonomists noted the existence of this plant in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, but hesitated naming it for lack of any sexual reproductive structures that would define it as a liverwort or hornwort,” McFarland said. “After these sexual reproduction structures were discovered, it was finally named and classified as a hornwort. This was not the end of the story. The next surprising discovery was that the species had a limited distribution and the two sexes were isolated from each other. “
Unlike elsewhere in its range, male and female plants in the US are geographically separated by ca. 30 km across rivers and mountains, as they grow on rocks in different watersheds of the Tennessee and Alabama Rivers.
“Whether male and female populations were geographically isolated to the extent that migration, and sporadic sexual reproduction was completely absent, and hence whether these populations relied always exclusively on asexual propagation was unknown,” McFarland said. “Resolving this uncertainty is critical to assess the vulnerability of these populations to environmental change.”
To confirm the total reproductive isolation, reconstruct its origin, and assess the mode of reproduction of N. aenigmaticus in southern Appalachia, researchers analyzed genetic data of more than 250 individuals of the species. Nothoceros aenigmaticus likely immigrated to the US from sexual Mexican ancestors about 600–800,000 years ago. The genomic data confirmed the absolute reproductive isolation between sexes and the absolute genetic isolation among southern Appalachian populations.
“The southern Appalachian drainage system is thought to have been remodeled by geological processes during the Pleistocene glaciations, which could have mixed genotypes from contiguous watersheds,” McFarland said.
Populations from contiguous watersheds share clones, but individuals lack mixed genetic traits, consistent with the lack of sexual reproduction, as is their overall reduced genetic diversity. This low extant genetic diversity and the extreme sex segregation point out the high vulnerability of N. aenigmaticus to extinction in southern Appalachia under major alteration of the habitats.
“Even though there are still unanswered questions, with the use of DNA technology, this publication has greatly expanded our understanding of the complex nature of N. aenigmaticus,” McFarland said.
Read the full article online here.
Stephanie Kivlin, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, coauthored a paper titled “Fungal aerobiota are not affected by time nor environment over a 13-y time series at the Mauna Loa Observatory,” published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers used 13 years of collected air samples from Mauna Loa Observatory on Hawaii Island to determine if local or global environmental factors influence fungi composition.
“One of the big questions in microbial ecology is trying to figure out how microbes disperse around the world and if they can disperse everywhere,” Kivlin said.
Kivlin and other researchers from the University of Hawaii initially genetically sequenced fungal spores and studied their traits, such as size and shape, before discovering the role wind patterns play in fungal spore dispersal.
“What we found was that we could trace back wind patterns to try to understand where the wind was coming from that deposited the fungal spores on the filters,” Kivlin said. “We saw some that were coming from Asia, bringing fungi that are never found in Hawaii. The wind patterns are really what’s blowing the fungi around.”
The researchers also discovered that some airborne fungal spores are still viable after traveling long distances.
“Because we found a couple of fungi that were dispersing all the way across the Pacific Ocean, we need to really consider how far fungi can go and what that means for dispersal of new pathogens into new areas,” Kivlin said. “We need to have better theory about how often those dispersal events occur, which fungi are coming, and if they are beneficial or harmful.”
Coauthors on the paper include Laura Tipton, Anthony Amend, and Nicole Hyson from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Erin Datlof from the University of Hawaii at Hilo, Geoffrey Zahn from Utah Valley University, and Patrick Sheridan from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Global Monitoring Division.
A paper describing the discovery of a new plant species, the Leatherleaf Tassel Rue (Trautvetteria fonticalcarea), was just published by recent UT graduate Aaron Floden (PhD 2017) in the Nordic Journal of Botany. Floden, writing with his PhD advisor Prof. Ed Schilling, also provided the first published description of the unique habitat in which this plant species grows, which occurs along the Powell River just north of Knoxville, Tennessee. Seep drainages formed by springs occur over a unique limestone substrate type in the area, producing small garden-like arrays of grasses and grass-like plants, herbaceous perennials, and small shrubs, but lacking trees. The seeps host other distinctive plants, many of which reach the southern-most extent of their natural ranges and are found in Tennessee only in this distinctive habitat. These include such beautiful plants as the Showy Lady’s Slipper and a form of Grass of Parnassus that may also be new. Floden, who is now on the staff at the Missouri Botanical Garden, has been working with TVA biologist Adam Datillo to compile and map a complete list of seep sites along the Powell River, with an eye toward considering ways to keep them preserved. Some of the larger seep areas may have been partially or completely inundated when Norris Dam was built, but there are still many nice examples. The springs that form the seeps are also utilized as a source of water by local residents. The seeps and their plants are a unique gem in the east Tennessee landscape that are worth saving for future generations to enjoy and appreciate.
The full article can be found here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/njb.01738/full
Leatherleaf Tassel Rue, Showy Lady’s Slipper, and Grass of Parnassus
The Armsworth Lab has a new open-access publication out in Nature Communications: “Factoring economic costs into conservation planning may not improve agreement over priorities for protection.” It is a collaboration between an interdisciplinary team of UT researchers with scientists at The Nature Conservancy and focuses on how best to identify candidate areas for establishing nature reserves.
Co-authors include Research Assistant Professor Heather Jackson, former graduate students Gwen Iacona (PhD 2014, now a postdoc at the University of Queensland) and Nate Sutton (MS 2014, now a data scientist for MedAmerica), and former postdoc Eric Larson (now faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).
The abstract is pasted below.
Conservation organizations must redouble efforts to protect habitat given continuing biodiversity declines. Prioritization of future areas for protection is hampered by disagreements over what the ecological targets of conservation should be. Here we test the claim that such disagreements will become less important as conservation moves away from prioritizing areas for protection based only on ecological considerations and accounts for varying costs of protection using return-on-investment (ROI) methods. We combine a simulation approach with a case study of forests in the eastern United States, paying particular attention to how covariation between ecological benefits and economic costs influences agreement levels. For many conservation goals, agreement over spatial priorities improves with ROI methods. However, we also show that a reliance on ROI-based prioritization can sometimes exacerbate disagreements over priorities. As such, accounting for costs in conservation planning does not enable society to sidestep careful consideration of the ecological goals of conservation.
In honor of the 50th anniversary of the seminal Simberloff and Wilson island biogeography studies, the Bulletin for the Ecological Society of America published a special extended edition of their “Paper Trail” series in October. In this series, young researchers tell stories of how a particular paper influenced them, and the original authors of the papers in turn describe their experiences with the paper.
For this special edition, a collection of researchers, ranging from graduate students to full professors, describe how the Simberloff and Wilson 1969 papers influenced their careers. From our department, Jeremiah Henning, Jordan Bush (graduate students), Christy Leppanen (lecturer and post doc), and Kimberly Sheldon (assistant professor) all contributed to this section. Dan Simberloff and Edward O. Wilson then wrote a reflection on the original paper, complete with photographs and stories from the mangrove experiments.
A Pioneering Adventure Becomes an Ecological Classic: Editor’s Note
(overview, by Young, Stephen L.)
A Pioneering Adventure Becomes an Ecological Classic: The Arising and Established Researchers
(Authors: Henning, Jeremiah A.; Leppanen, Christy; Bush, Jordan; Sheldon, Kimberly S; Gotelli, Nick; Gravel, Dominique; Strauss, Sharon)
A Pioneering Adventure Becomes an Ecological Classic: The Pioneers
(Authors: Simberloff, Daniel; Wilson, Edward)
Adjunct Assistant Professor Ben Keck just published two articles, each describing a new species of fish that relied on specimens from the David A. Etnier Ichthyological Collection at UT. Congratulations, Ben!
Associate Professor Mike Blum has a new paper out in the journal Ecosphere this month, called “Socioecological disparities in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.” Some science news outlets have picked up on the article:
The paper’s findings are particularly topical as communities in Texas and Florida begin to rebuild after recent hurricanes Harvey and Irma.