Planting plan for Oak Park and River Forest Township high school. [Oak Park, Illinois?]

Pencil on tracing paper; location, type of plantings; at lower right, "C.E. del."; signed. 105x73 cm. Scale: 1"=16' [from photographic copy by Lance Burgharrdt]

Planting plan for River Forest park no. 1

Ink on linen; location, type, amounts of plantings; grape arbors, tennis courts; note: "del, F.E.H."; signed; 56 x 33 cm; Scale: 1" = 20' [from photographic copy by Lance Burgharrdt]

Planting plan. River Forest Park District. No. 2

Pencil on tracing paper; location, type, amounts of plantings; buildings, depot; signed; 75 x 58 cm; Scale: 1" = 20' [from photographic copy by Lance Burgharrdt]

Planting plan for River Forest Park District #2... Section #2

Pencil on tracing paper; location, type, amounts of plantings; signed; 53 x 66 cm; Scale: 1" = 20' [from photographic copy by Lance Burgharrdt]

Planting plan for River Forest Park District #2. Section #3.

Pencil on tracing paper; location, type, amounts of plantings; council ring, pool; along right edge, "Soo Line" railroad runs; notes; signed; 63 x 61 cm.; Scale: 1" = 20' [from photographic copy by Lance Burgharrdt]

The role of large woody debris and riparian forest in channel avulsion in the Carbon River, Mount Rainier National Park, Washington

A specific type of natural log jam in the upper alluvial reach of the Carbon River was found to influence secondary channel avulsion, causing flooding hazards to the adjacent Carbon River Road in the northwest quadrant of Mount Rainier National Park, Washington. The fence-like natural log jam was characterized by large woody debris buttressed horizontally against standing riparian trees (i.e. ìfence railsî and ìfence postî). The objectives of this report are two-fold. First, physical characteristics and spatial distribution were documented to determine the geomorphic controls on the fence-like log jams. Second, the function and timing of the natural log jam in relation to channel avulsion was determined to provide insight into flooding hazards along the Carbon River Road. The fence-like log jams are most abundant in the upper reaches of the Carbon River between 3.0 and 5.5 kilometers from the Carbon Glacier terminus, where longitudinal gradient significantly decreases from about 0.06 to 0.03. Sediment impoundment can occur directly upstream of the fence-like log jam, creating vertical bed elevation difference as high as 1.32 meters, and can form during low magnitude, high frequency flood event (3.5-year recurrence interval). In some locations, headcuts and widening of secondary channel were observed directly to the side of the log jams, suggesting its role in facilitating secondary channel avulsions. Areas along the Carbon River Road more prone to damages from avulsion hazards were identified by coupling locations of the log jams and Relative Water Surface Elevation map created using the 1-meter 2012 Light Detection and Ranging Digital Elevation Map. Ultimately, the results of this report may provide insight to flooding hazards along the Carbon River Road from log jam-facilitated channel avulsion.

Habitat type and density influence vocal signal design in satin bowerbirds

This study provided a thorough test of the acoustic adaptation hypothesis using a within-species comparison of call structure involving a wide range of habitat types, an objective measure of habitat density and direct measures of habitat-related attenuation. The structure of the bower advertisement call of the satin bowerbird was measured in 16 populations from throughout the species' range and related to the habitat type and density at each site. Transmission of white noise, pure tones and different bowerbird dialects was measured in five of six habitat types inhabited by satin bowerbirds. Bowerbird advertisement call structure converged in similar habitats but diverged among different habitats; this pattern was apparent at both continent-wide and local geographical scales. Bowerbirds' call structures differed with changes in habitat density, consistent with the acoustic adaptation hypothesis. Lower frequencies and less frequency modulation were utilized in denser habitats such as rainforest and higher frequencies and more frequency modulation were used in the more open eucalypt-dominated habitats. The white noise and pure tone transmission measurements indicated that different habitats varied in their sound transmission properties in a manner consistent with the observed variation in satin bowerbird vocalizations. There was no effect of geographical proximity of recording locations, nor was there the predicted inverse relationship between frequency and body size. These findings indicate that the transmission qualities of different habitats have had a major influence on variation in vocal phenotypes in this species. In addition, previously published molecular data for this species suggest that there is no effect of genetic relatedness on call similarity among satin bowerbird populations.

Developing a forest data portal to support multi-scale decision making

Forests play a pivotal role in timber production, maintenance and development of biodiversity and in carbon sequestration and storage in the context of the Kyoto Protocol. Policy makers and forest experts therefore require reliable information on forest extent, type and change for management, planning and modeling purposes. It is becoming increasingly clear that such forest information is frequently inconsistent and unharmonised between countries and continents. This research paper presents a forest information portal that has been developed in line with the GEOSS and INSPIRE frameworks. The web portal provides access to forest resources data at a variety of spatial scales, from global through to regional and local, as well as providing analytical capabilities for monitoring and validating forest change. The system also allows for the utilisation of forest data and processing services within other thematic areas. The web portal has been developed using open standards to facilitate accessibility, interoperability and data transfer.

Melissa Romigh carrying wood to construct boardwalk in mangrove forest, Shark River Slough

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation through the Florida Coastal Everglades Long-Term Ecological Research program under Cooperative Agreements #DBI-0620409 and #DEB-9910514. This image is made available for non-commercial or educational use only.

Forest Resource Islands in a Sub-tropical Marsh: Soil–Site Relationships in Everglades Hardwood Hammocks

Spatial heterogeneity in soils is often characterized by the presence of resource-enriched patches ranging in size from a single shrub to wooded thickets. If the patches persist long enough, the primary constraint on production may transition from one limiting environmental factor to another. Tree islands that are scattered throughout the Florida Everglades basin comprise nutrient-enriched patches, or resource islands, in P-limited oligotrophic marshes. We used principal component analysis and multiple regressions to characterize the belowground environment (soil, hydrology) of one type of tree island, hardwood hammocks, and examined its relationship with the three structural variables (basal area, biomass, and canopy height) indicative of site productivity. Hardwood hammocks in the southern Everglades grow on two distinct soil types. The first, consisting of shallow, organic, relatively low-P soils, is common in the seasonally flooded Marl Prairie landscape. In contrast, hammocks on islands embedded in long hydroperiod marsh have deeper, alkaline, mineral soils with extremely high P concentrations. However, this edaphic variation does not translate simply into differences in forest structure and production. Relative water depth was unrelated to all measures of forest structure and so was soil P, but the non-carbonate component of the mineral soil fraction exhibited a strong positive relationship with canopy height. The development of P-enriched forest resource islands in the Everglades marsh is accompanied by the buildup of a mineral soil; however, limitations on growth in mature islands appear to differ substantively from those that dominate incipient stages in the transformation from marsh to forest. Key words: resource island; tree

People and big cats (Panthera onca and Puma concolor) of the Atlantic Forest, Brazil

Conservation of large felids is not only about collecting ecological information; it is also about understanding people’s values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviour. The overarching goal of this thesis is to assess the relationship between people and jaguars and pumas. Specifically by contributing to the understanding of public acceptance of big cats, as well as the forces (cognitive and social) that influence people’s acceptability. Self-administered questionnaires (n=326) were applied to rural residents outside two protected areas in the State of Sao Paulo: Intervales and PETAR state parks. Findings showed that the acceptability of killing big cats varied accordingly to attitudinal type (positive and negative). Additionally, acceptability of jaguars and pumas was influenced by existence values, attitudes and park credibility. Human dimensions research helped in understanding the relationship between people and the big cats, highlighting the need, for example, to improve the credibility of the parks in the communities and to decrease the fear of jaguars and pumas.

Predicting Forest Responses to Changing Environmental Conditions

Forests change with changes in their environment based on the physiological responses of individual trees. These short-term reactions have cumulative impacts on long-term demographic performance. For a tree in a forest community, success depends on biomass growth to capture above- and belowground resources and reproductive output to establish future generations. Here we examine aspects of how forests respond to changes in moisture and light availability and how these responses are related to tree demography and physiology.

First we address the long-term pattern of tree decline before death and its connection with drought. Increasing drought stress and chronic morbidity could have pervasive impacts on forest composition in many regions. We use long-term, whole-stand inventory data from southeastern U.S. forests to show that trees exposed to drought experience multiyear declines in growth prior to mortality. Following a severe, multiyear drought, 72% of trees that did not recover their pre-drought growth rates died within 10 years. This pattern was mediated by local moisture availability. As an index of morbidity prior to death, we calculated the difference in cumulative growth after drought relative to surviving conspecifics. The strength of drought-induced morbidity varied among species and was correlated with species drought tolerance.

Next, we investigate differences among tree species in reproductive output relative to biomass growth with changes in light availability. Previous studies reach conflicting conclusions about the constraints on reproductive allocation relative to growth and how they vary through time, across species, and between environments. We test the hypothesis that canopy exposure to light, a critical resource, limits reproductive allocation by comparing long-term relationships between reproduction and growth for trees from 21 species in forests throughout the southeastern U.S. We found that species had divergent responses to light availability, with shade-intolerant species experiencing an alleviation of trade-offs between growth and reproduction at high light. Shade-tolerant species showed no changes in reproductive output across light environments.

Given that the above patterns depend on the maintenance of transpiration, we next developed an approach for predicting whole-tree water use from sap flux observations. Accurately scaling these observations to tree- or stand-levels requires accounting for variation in sap flux between wood types and with depth into the tree. We compared different models with sap flux data to test the hypotheses that radial sap flux profiles differ by wood type and tree size. We show that radial variation in sap flux is dependent on wood type but independent of tree size for a range of temperate trees. The best-fitting model predicted out-of-sample sap flux observations and independent estimates of sapwood area with small errors, suggesting robustness in new settings. We outline a method for predicting whole-tree water use with this model and include computer code for simple implementation in other studies.

Finally, we estimated tree water balances during drought with a statistical time-series analysis. Moisture limitation in forest stands comes predominantly from water use by the trees themselves, a drought-stand feedback. We show that drought impacts on tree fitness and forest composition can be predicted by tracking the moisture reservoir available to each tree in a mass balance. We apply this model to multiple seasonal droughts in a temperate forest with measurements of tree water use to demonstrate how species and size differences modulate moisture availability across landscapes. As trees deplete their soil moisture reservoir during droughts, a transpiration deficit develops, leading to reduced biomass growth and reproductive output.

This dissertation draws connections between the physiological condition of individual trees and their behavior in crowded, diverse, and continually-changing forest stands. The analyses take advantage of growing data sets on both the physiology and demography of trees as well as novel statistical techniques that allow us to link these observations to realistic quantitative models. The results can be used to scale up tree measurements to entire stands and address questions about the future composition of forests and the land’s balance of water and carbon.

Sharon Ewe sampling seedling regeneration in a forest gap, Shark River Slough

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation through the Florida Coastal Everglades Long-Term Ecological Research program under Cooperative Agreements #DBI-0620409 and #DEB-9910514. This image is made available for non-commercial or educational use only.

Left to right: Dan Bond and Melissa Romigh. Setting up a flume panel to measure nutrient / sediment fluxed in a mangrove forest at SRS-6, Shark River Slough

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation through the Florida Coastal Everglades Long-Term Ecological Research program under Cooperative Agreements #DBI-0620409 and #DEB-9910514. This image is made available for non-commercial or educational use only.