There's a war on in America, pitting invasive ant against invasive ant in a fight to the finish. It's sort of like Alien vs. Predator, in a way, because whoever wins ... we lose. Argentine ants (the reigning champions) have wiped out native ant species in many of the environments they've invaded over the years, affecting the survival of other animals that used to feed on those ants. Worse, they have a fondness for certain agricultural pests, like aphids. In places with lots of Argentine ants, aphids do very well — and plants do worse.

But now the Argentines are facing a serious challenge in the form of Asian needle ants, another invasive species that — for reasons nobody really understands — have suddenly gone from minor player to major threat in the last decade. The big downside to Asian needle ants: They sting. They sting us. And, right now, it looks like they're winning.

John Roach tells the story at NBC News. But you can get a good idea of what this matchup looks like by checking out the work of insect photographer Alex Wild. That's his picture above, showing an Argentine ant on the left and an Asian needle ant on the right.

Tristan sez, "Open Source Ecology founder Marcin Jakubowski and the OSE team explain the philosophy behind their work and the open source movement as a whole. We're always looking for remote collaborators to pick up and run with our designs. If you're interested in building or improving on our work, please visit the OSE wiki."

Open Source Philosophy. (Thanks, Tristan!) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/27/open-source-ecology-explained.html/feed 19 http://boingboing.net/2012/11/30/how-monoculture-farming-change.html http://boingboing.net/2012/11/30/how-monoculture-farming-change.html#comments Fri, 30 Nov 2012 18:27:28 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=197521

This image, taken by artist David Liittschwager shows the plants and animals collected in a square meter of South African public park over the course of 24 hours.

This image, from National Public Radio, illustrates the plants and animals found over the course of two nights and three days in an Iowa cornfield.

Robert Krulwich has a fascinating piece about the ways food systems affect ecological systems. How efficient is too efficient?

We talk a lot about chain stores and the way their proliferation takes away the individual character of American cities, replacing it with a homogenized urban landscape of Wal-Marts, malls, and Applebees*. But some scientists think businesses and buildings aren't the only thing making our cities look more alike.

The ecology of cities could be homogenizing, as well — everything from the plants that grow there, to the number and density of ponds and creeks, to the bacteria and fungi that live in the soils. My newest column for The New York Times Magazine explains why ecologists think cities are becoming more alike, and what it means if they're right. The really interesting bit: The effects aren't all uniformly bad.

“Americans just have some certain preferences for the way residential settlements ought to look,” Peter Groffman, a microbial ecologist with the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y., recently told me. Over the course of the last century, we’ve developed those preferences and started applying them to a wide variety of natural landscapes, shifting all places — whether desert, forest or prairie — closer to the norm. Since the 1950s, for example, Phoenix has been remade into a much wetter place that more closely resembles the pond-dotted ecosystem of the Northeast. Sharon Hall, an associate professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, said, “The Phoenix metro area contains on the order of 1,000 lakes today, when previously there were none.” Meanwhile, naturally moist Minneapolis is becoming drier as developers fill in wetlands.

Why does any of this matter to anyone who’s not an urban ecologist? “If 20 percent of urban areas are covered with impervious surfaces,” says Groffman, “then that also means that 80 percent is natural surface.” Whatever is going on in that 80 percent of the country’s urban space — as Groffman puts it, “the natural processes happening in neighborhoods” — has a large, cumulative ecological effect.

Read the rest of the story at The New York Times Magazine

Image: Taken by Ben Schumin, used via CC.

In the United Arab Emirates, a freshwater lake has appeared in the middle of the desert. The oasis is beautiful and full of life, and it's risen 35 feet since 2011. It's also probably accidentally man-made.

Hydrologists believe the lake formed from recycled drinking water (and toilet water). The nearby city of Al Ain pumps in desalinated sea water, uses it for drinking and flushing the toilet, cleans it in a sewage treatment plant, and then re-uses it to water plants. All of that water ends up in the soil and, at the lake site, it comes back up.

The water is clean, writes Ari Daniel Shapiro at NPR. Don't worry about that. Instead, the major side-effect of the lake is change, as scientists watch the desert ecosystem that used to exist on the site decline, and a new one rise to take its place. It's a great story that shows how complicated discussions about ecology can be. On the one hand, you're losing something valuable. At least in this one spot. On the other hand, you're definitely gaining something valuable, too.

"With every species that we lose, it's like rolling the dice. The whole ecosystem could crash down," Howarth says.

But Clark, with the U.S. Geological Survey, says he's not so worried about the desert ecosystem. He says the lake is tiny compared to the vast amount of desert in this part of the world. "If I look through the binoculars, there's, like, seven different kinds of herons. There's greater cormorants. There's ferruginous ducks, which are another very rare worldwide species," Clark says. "There's about 15 of them out here."

This year, three types of birds bred at this lake. They've never been able to breed before in the United Arab Emirates. But this lake, and the others like it, have changed all that. There are fish appearing in these lakes as well. Fish eggs cling to the feet and legs of the herons. So as the birds shuttle between old and new lakes, the eggs fall off and hatch. That's how you get fish in a desert.

Read the full story at NPR

Over at my sister-in-law Heather Sparks's new Science Sparks Art tumblog, selections from Richard Misrach and Kate Orff's book Petrochemical America, a collection of Misrach's photos and Orff's "ecological atlas" documenting Louisiana's "Chemical Corridor," aka "Cancer Alley." Above, Taft, Louisana's Holy Rosary Cemetery purchased by Dow Chemical. Petrochemical America]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/10/09/scenes-from-petrochemical-am.html/feed 5 http://boingboing.net/2012/09/24/recreating-the-sound-of-early.html http://boingboing.net/2012/09/24/recreating-the-sound-of-early.html#comments Mon, 24 Sep 2012 16:14:14 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=182915 researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been able to recreate what the environment sounded like back then. At least, what it sounded like around Aldo Leopold's house. His notes, and the recreated sound, are allowing scientists to learn more about species migration and how industrialization has changed ecology.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/09/24/recreating-the-sound-of-early.html/feed 2 http://boingboing.net/2012/09/13/the-grisly-business-of-buffalo.html http://boingboing.net/2012/09/13/the-grisly-business-of-buffalo.html#comments Thu, 13 Sep 2012 15:38:41 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=180804

By this point in your lives, most of you are by no doubt aware of the massive slaughter of buffalo that happened in the United States in the late 19th century. Across the plains, thousands of buffalo were killed every week during a brief period where the hides of these animals could fetch upwards of $10 a pop. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator only goes back to 1913, so it's hard for me to say what that's worth today. But we know from the context that even when the value of buffalo hides dropped to $1 each, the business of killing and skinning buffalo was still considered a damned fine living.)

You might think that the business ended there, with dead, skinned buffalo left to rot on the prairie. And you're sort of right. But, in a story at Bloomberg News, Tim Heffernan explains that, a few years later, those dead buffalo created another boom and bust industry—the bone collection business.

Animal bones were useful things in the 19th century. Dried and charred, they produced a substance called bone black. When coarsely crushed, it could filter impurities out of sugar-cane juice, leaving a clear liquid that evaporated to produce pure white sugar -- a lucrative industry. Bone black also made a useful pigment for paints, dyes and cosmetics, and acted as a dry lubricant for iron and steel forgings.

... And so the homesteaders gathered the buffalo bones. It was easy work: Children could do it. Carted to town, a ton of bones fetched a few dollars. Sent to rendering plants and furnaces in the big industrial cities, that same ton was worth between $18 and $27. Boiled, charred, crushed or powdered, it was worth as much as $60.

... By the 1880s, however, a few reporters were expressing nervous awe at the scale of the cleansing, and even despair for what had been lost. In 1891, not 25 years after the slaughter began, the Chicago Daily Tribune ran a dispatch titled “Relics of the Buffalo.” The relics were the animals’ empty pathways and dust wallows, worn into the surface of the Manitoba plains over countless years. The bones, let alone the living creatures, were long gone.

It's a fascinating read. And to give you a more vivid idea of what this short-lived industry looked like at its height, I want to share a quote with you that Heffernan found in an August, 1891 issue of The San Francisco Chronicle. This quote isn't in his Bloomberg story. It also uses some derogatory language towards people of Native American ancestry. So you'll want to be aware of that going in. Despite that racism, I think it's worth posting here for the visual description of the bone business.

Reading this quote (and Heffernan's story) is where I, for the first time, got a real understanding of how insane the buffalo slaughter really was, and the impact it must have had on both Native American communities and the overall ecology of the West. To grasp the idea of millions of dead animals as more than a statistic, you have to "see" the aftermath.

From The San Francisco Chronicle, August 1891, in an article titled "Half-Breeds Scouring the Plains for Fertilizer Material":

"Scarcely a station along the road but has two or three pyramids of bones awaiting shipment. To the traveler they have the appearance at a distance of hills covered with snow, but upon closer examination the skulls, ribs, and other bones of human beings as well as animals are revealed in all their hideousness. These half-breeds have worked industriously at the gathering of the bones, as the absence of them on the prairies will attest. They are well paid for their work."

Read Tim Heffernan's story in Bloomberg News

Last month, I spent several days in Harvard Forest, 3500 acres of woods dedicated to scientific research. The forest is home to dozens of research projects, some short-term, others stretching over decades. I told you a little about how I got to participate in some of these studies, learning how to collect and analyze data in the same ways that ecologists do. Along the way, I ran into something a little weird—trees that were very much alive, but weren't growing.

If those of us who are not tree experts know anything at all about tree life cycles it's probably centered on tree rings. We learned back in grade school that trees form a new ring every year. Chop down the tree, and you can see a record sometimes stretching back hundreds of years—burn marks indicating fire, fat rings during times of plenty, and thin rings showing resource scarcity. And we know that scientists use these rings to learn about the past, to find out what was happening in local environments before human beings started to painstakingly record that information.

When it makes a new ring, a tree becomes a little fatter. Over decades, you should see a change in its diameter. So I was surprised, during my time in Harvard Forest, to run across several red maple trees that hadn't grown an inch in 11 years. Scientists had measured the trees in 2001. We came back and measured them in 2012. In that time, the diameters hadn't changed at all.

Turns out, this was not mere mis-measurement on my part. Neil Pederson is an assistant research professor in Columbia University's Tree Ring Laboratory. He's also found red maples (and other trees) that are living, but not growing, in the Harvard Forest. Pederson calls them zombie maples. He says these trees are really representative of the fact that individual plants can vary from one another as much as individual people—something scientists have to account for in their work. It's also a great example of how complicated even seemingly simple science can become once you start to dig into the details.

Neil Pederson: I was doing research at the Eddy Flux Tower plot to see if we could match tree rings to the carbon flux. The Eddy Flux Tower plot is this highly engineered system of taking up samples above, below, and winthin the canopy of the forest to see how carbon is moving through the forest. There are samples taken constantly, 24-7. I was there in 2003 or 2004 and it had been going for about 11 years at the time. They’d seen that the forest was continually taking up carbon in the form of new growth, and every few years they were going out and measuring the forest to document that. We went out to take cores and look at the tree rings. My idea was to take those tree rings and put them in a regional context by measuring similar trees across the Northeast. I initially focused on red oak because those were the biggest and most dominant trees in the plot.

The Eddy Flux Tower plot is thought to reflect ecosystem productivity. Normally, they measure all the trees. When we did our measurements, we decided to be efficient and see if we could get at the same number by measuring only the most dominant and largest trees. Maybe those would be the most important. Our tree rings didn’t quite agree with Eddy Flux Tower measurements, so that suggested that there were other trees we needed to core to get a good idea of ecosystem productivity.

So we went back and we cored the red maple. These trees aren't big, but they are the most numerous in the understory. With those two species we had a significant percentage of the forest in terms of biomass and numbers of trees. And that’s how I stumbled into it—maples sitting there alive, but not growing.

NP: When we core trees, everyone understand that rings say something about age and growth. But not every tree produces a new ring around the base of the stem each you. You can have missing rings or locally absent rings during times of stress on the tree. Because of that you have to cross date trees. We core different trees and make sure the patterns match. By comparing them you can get a good idea of whether each individual ring is correctly dated. Then you just keep adding trees to the comparison and building up this profile within a population and a species.

I worked up the first five red maples really quick. In like a day. They have a ring structure that isn’t as easy to see as that of a pine or hemlock, but I figured I’d be done in four days.

But then I got to the next tree, and I cross-dated it as best I could but it wasn’t behaving the same. It wasn’t growing there as well. We have a statistical program that helps us cross date and spot the patterns that eyes might miss. The program said we were missing five rings and I thought, "That can’t be right."

I put that core down and went through two or three other trees with no problem. But then the next tree was missing seven rings. And these weren’t old trees, either. They weren't in old age decline. They were maybe only 50 or 60 years old. I started recognizing that in 1981 the trees had a white ring, not caramel like red maple can look. That was the year of the gypsy moth defoliation event. The moth removed leaves. Without the leaves, the tree can't feed itself as well and the wood is less dense. So that's where the white ring comes from.

Once I had found that white ring as a marker ring I started realizing that in the last decade or so before I cored them the trees had just stopped growing.

I presented the info to my committee at the time. and they said, “Are they alive?” And I said, "Yeah, but they must be zombies." That’s why I was excited when I saw your tweet about zombie maples. It confirmed that somebody else had seen this through direct measurements. That’s important. It's not our only corroborating evidence. We had a technician here almost 30 years ago who cored red maples in the catskill mountains. I pulled out his cores and measured them and he has scores of missing rings in the decade before those trees were cored. The trees were still alive, but not growing at the base of the tree.

NP: An eco-physiologist on my Ph.D. committee just got fascinated by this and what it means. Are they adding growth higher up the trunk someplace? Are they reusing the old tubes for passing water and nutrients up and down the tree? Usually each new growth ring replaces the old tubes. There’s a a lot of plant physiology questions that could be looked into here. It's an interesting phenomenon.

And we don't know exactly what's causing it. It's not the run-in with gypsy moths. In surviving red oak, for instance, after the gypsy moth defoliation they were growing back like nothing had happened within three to five years. Trees can get back to normal in a few years depending on severity of the disturbance. An earthquake can knock trees back for a decade or more before they recover. Some really severe defoliation events can take a decade or more. But trees are amazingly resilient. They have to be. They can’t run from anything.

We've not found any sign of climactic stress on these trees, either. If anything, since the 1990s in the Northeast winters have gotten warmer and that’s actually less stressful. My hypothesis is that ecology is driving this. These trees are small. They're in the understory and suppressed and they’re getting beat out by much faster growing red oak trees. I’ve seen a lot of missing rings in trees since I first spotted the zombie maples. It's a lot more frequent then the literature would suggest. And I think it’s simply competition. They’re losing out to bigger trees.

NP: Who wants to die? That’s kind of a joke, but it’s kind of not. Trees have the tenacity to grow in unbelievalble conditions. A white cedar can grow for 200 years under normal conditions, but they can also take root on cliff faces and live there for 800 to 1000 years. A chestnut oak I was looking at yesterday, it grew maybe two inches in diameter in 100 years. That's incredibly slow growth. It’s not what you think of when you think of oak.

But it makes sense. In general, trees can’t improve their condition actively the way that things like beavers or alligators can. Some trees can drop needles and promote fires that kill competitors in the understory. Other trees leach out toxins that kill nearby plants. We're finding more and more plants that do have abilities like that, but they're still not as capable as animals to change or move the environment around them. So they just persist. They keep on living for another day.

Forests here in the Northeast are dense. This might just be one survival strategy where you sit in the understory for as long as you can hoping that a neighbor will fall over and give you light and space. That’s painting some very human feelings on a tree, but you get the idea. They’re programmed to survive and reproduce and being a zombie is not a bad strategy for doing that. How they persist in that state, though, that's a really interesting question.

Unfortunately, no. Tree rings have become famous and infamous lately. Dendrochronology has really exploded in the last couple decades because it’s a really good way to understand our climate past. Tree records are so good and they can inform us of so much information and tell us whether today's conditions are normal or unusual. So we core trees for so many reasons and along the way we find all these other things, like zombies. It’s fascinating. But it’s not the main focus of my work. I just learn about it enough to make my work better.

For instance, we have this 36-year-old pitch pine planted in a plantation. We found that after looking at 200 trees, 80-90% of the trees were missing the 1992 ring. We think it was another defoliation event that happened. So we’re going to take cross sections at half meter intervals up the trunk of the trees. We can’t analyze all 600 samples, but we’ll be able to look at enough to see whether those trees formed rings higher up the trunk. Maybe they formed a ring at 5 meters, even if they didn’t form at 1 meter. That will help answer that one question about zombie trees. We do know that trees are more likely to form rings higher up and missing rings become less of a problem as you move up a stem. We know this stuff, but we don’t always have the time or motivation to publish on every detail we learn. We can’t publish on everything, there's not enough time in the day.

Not really. Not if you're doing dendrochronology correctly. Remember when I was talking about cross-dating? That's the key. You have to pay attention to populations, not just individuals.

When we found the zombie maples, we were coring trees in an understory and we were looking at all of the trees. When you're looking for climate signals, you look at the trees that are most likely to capture the aspect you're trying to study. You try to isolate the signal in the environment first. So you find the trees that are less influenced by competition. We target overstory trees that are getting full sunlight and those are much less likely to drop rings like this.

Now there are missing rings even in those kind of trees, but it’s really rare for it to happen across a population. So then we core 20 trees or more in a population. This is how we control for this potential issue. We’ve collected a lot of samples from all around the world. There are times when they’re more or less prone to forming rings, but I can’t think of a single population where all the trees in the population missed a ring.

The only time I know of where all but two didn’t form a ring was in a population that experienced an insect defoliation in 1748. All the trees but two failed to produce a ring that year. But we don’t use that population for climate studies precisely because we know that the insect signal disrupted the growth.

Scientists measure trees for a wide variety of reasons. When I visited the Harvard Forest last week, I measured them as part of studying carbon sequestration by plants. But you can't just go out into the woods with any old tape measure and expect to collect some significant data.

That's because where you measure the tree matters. If you want to compare the diameters of two trees, you have to make sure you're measuring them in the same place. If you measured one tree at the wide base and the other further up the trunk, where trees usually get narrower, the comparison wouldn't mean much.

That's where diameter breast height (DBH) comes in. It's a way of standardizing the measuring process.

As the name implies, DBH is meant to be a diameter measurement of a tree trunk taken at, roughly, breast height on an adult. Of course, where exactly "adult breast height" is varies greatly from person to person. So DBH has been set to a standard height—1.4 meters in the United States.

In a research forest, you'll often see some kind of marker on the trees showing where this official "breast hight" is, so people can quickly move through the woods, taking diameter measurements, without having to measure vertically on each tree. In some cases, DBH is marked with yellow spray paint. In others, metal bands. These metal bands actually help measure diameter, too. Set with springs, the bands expand as the tree does, so all researchers have to is measure the distance between two dots on the band and see how far apart the dots have moved since last time.

Read all the Dispatches from Harvard Forest

Seventy-one feet above the Harvard Forest, you can stand on a plywood platform attached to a slightly swaying tower of metal scaffolding, and look out over miles of hemlock groves. On the ground, the trees are massive—trunks reaching up and up and up. From the top of the tower, though, the view feels a bit like hanging out in a Christmas Tree farm. All you see are the friendly, conical tops.

The Hemlock Eddy Flux Tower is one of four research towers in the Harvard Forest. Since 2001, data collection systems on the top of this tower have measured carbon dioxide, water vapor, and wind currents. These measurements are made five times every second.

Thanks to this system, we now know that even a relatively old forest like this can still capture and store a decent amount of carbon dioxide. The hemlocks around the tower are pushing 230. That's not terribly old by tree standards, but it's old for this part of North America—most of which was once clear cut. It's also old enough to challenge some previously held conventional wisdom about what kinds of forests are best for carbon sequestration. Previously, scientists thought only young forests, where the trees were still growing rapidly, did that job very well. Sites like the Hemlock Tower have shown a different story.

Also: It's rather terrifying to climb. The tower lives, it is not stationary. A network of steel cables keep it from toppling over, but you can still feel it tilting one way and then the other underneath you. And, at every landing on the stairs, there's a precarious little gap you have to step over. I took my camera with me in one hand as I made the ascent. About partway up, the filming quality takes a notable turn for the worse as I found myself clinging a bit more tightly to the hand rails. How's that for an awesome tool of science?

Video Link

Tim Matson is the established guru of building ponds with an earth-seal, rather than with a plastic or concrete lining. For 30 years he's been creating, advising, and collecting knowledge about pond-making. His classic Earth Ponds (2nd ed.) is the basic how-to, and comes with a DVD. It supplies the needed lessons in siting a pond, building it, maintaining it, enjoying it, and also restoring old ponds. This is not your average how-to; it's beautifully written and a joy to read. If you find the basics to your liking and need more, Matson has an updated Sourcebook with plenty of resources, and an illustrated encyclopedia of pond variations and building techniques. Finally, Matson has a helpful website with more videos and sources.

--KK

Earth Ponds: The Country Pond Maker's Guide to Building, Maintenance and Restoration

 
Tim Matson, 1982, 152 pages


$18

Sample Excerpts:

Scraping bottom in the pond basin Ray searches for flaws in the earth seal--clusters of pervious stone or gravel that would be the source of potential leaks. He carves out these patches and substitutes watertight soil. A good seal is the best defense against seepage. Pond makers who claim they can waterproof impossible sites with chemical additives and underwater dynamite blasts should run out of town. Like a potter's bowl, the earth pond is molded with a  blend of materials. In addition to drawing a sufficient supply of water, this site consists of good watertight soil: about 10 to 20 percent clay and an even mix of silt, sand, and gravel. Preliminary test holes in the pond basin are crucial in evaluating the worthiness of a site.

*

*

The sand drop is another well-esteemed pond keeper's trick that takes advantage of the ice deck. It's an upkeep technique well suited to older ponds in need of restoration, particularly where aquatic vegetation or mud get unruly. To set up a sand drop, the pond keeper spreads a two-to-four inch layer of sand--not salted road sand--over the ice. In spring when the ice thaws, poof! The sand falls in a uniform layer over the basin floor. Sand works like an inorganic mulch, shading out weeds and, like the finings in a beer crock, holding down sediment. In muddy ponds, it's a good carpet material for the basin floor. One of my neighbors was able to use a sand drop to eliminate the slimy bottom in her family's pond, along with snakes and leeches. True, the sand drop does fill in the pond to a minute degree, but it's not often done, and it sure beats herbicides.

*

Trout have a reputation as fussy feeders, picky as spoiled Siamese cats; yet for three years I've watched my brook trout gain weight without an ounce of supplemental feed. I see them feast on the bottom as much as in the air: the water is as transparent as an aquarium. I recall my neighbor's drawdown and follow-up trout stocking: clearly, the fish were pitching in to keep it clean. And I recalled an old Vermont tradition: to keep the farmhouse water clean, a trout was dropped in the well.

*

Fixing low-tide ponds begins with a search for leakage. Ponds with piping often leak around the outside of the pipe or through seams, gaskets, and valves. In most cases, unless a fitting can be easily replaced, pipe repair involves digging up the line to repair joints or to implant anti-seep collars.

Know of a better tool, or need a recommendation? Submit a review or request!

I'm currently attending the Marine Biological Laboratory's 10-day science journalism fellowship. As part of that, I get to do some hands-on science experiments and get a better perspective on how the work of science is done and how data is collected. Along with five other fellows, I spent last weekend collecting A LOT of data in Massachusetts' Harvard Forest—3,500 acres of extremely well-documented wilderness.

All this week, I'll be posting some of the highlights from my trip—videos and photos that will introduce you to the Harvard Forest, how science is done in the field, and to some of the key ideas that I'm learning during my time here.

This will be the central access point for all those posts. Check back every day to see what's new.

In This Series:
Scientific Research in a Forest
How Past Land Use Affects the Current Landscape
How To: Collect 6000-year-old swamp mud
Climbing a rickety stair to the top of the forest
What's your diameter breast height?
The secret world of swamp mud

Do you see how the ground level is higher on the left-hand side of this photo? To the right of the stone wall, the ground distinctly drops by a foot or more.

That wall is more than 200 years old. It marks the border between what was once a plowed field (on the left) and grazing pasture (on the right). Today, this site is woodland—part of the Harvard Forest, the most-studied forest in the world. But for generations, this land was farmed by Jonathan Sanderson and his descendants. And, even two centuries later, you can still see the way different uses of the land changed the land.

For instance, the ground level is higher on the left because plowed fields erode more easily. This site is on a slight slope. Water runs downhill, toward the right hand corner of the photo. As it did that, it carried bits of plowed field along with it—sediment that washed up against the stone wall and stayed there. Over many years, the effect changed the level of the land.

This isn't necessarily a catastrophic thing. But it is change. I spent last weekend in the Harvard Forest, participating in science in a hands-on way as part of the Marine Biological Laboratory's science journalism fellowship. One of the things I learned during my stint in the forest: The past ain't past. History is recorded in geology and ecology as surely as it's recorded in books. Very cool stuff!

I spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in the Harvard Forest—the most-studied forest in the world. It's an interesting place, with a complicated history. Originally forest, it was clear-cut in the decades following European settlement. By 1830, less than 90% of this part of Massachusetts had any forest left. But that trend had already begun to reverse itself by 1850, spurred by urbanization and cheaper, more-efficient farming in the "West" (i.e., Ohio).

What is now the Harvard Forest was farmland for many years. Then it was used for tree plantations. Then it became forest again, studied first by Harvard University's forestry program in the early 20th century, and then by ecologists and other environmental scientists beginning in the 1980s. Today, these 3,500 acres are home to dozens of individual studies and long-term, interdisciplinary projects led by scientists from more than 15 universities and institutions.

This particular study, led by Dr. Jerry Melillo of the Marine Biological Laboratory, is studying the nitrogen and carbon cycles of forests, and how those cycles are affected by rising soil temperatures. They're trying to understand how climate change will affect the growth of wild plants, and how it will affect those plants' ability to absorb and store carbon dioxide. I'll get more in-depth on this study later. Right now, I thought that this site offered a really great view of what a research forest looks like—it's a chance to see detail-oriented science and wild nature interacting and overlapping.

Here's a couple more photos that will give you an idea of the kind of things you might find in a research forest.

They include electronics in odd places. This junction box delivers power that runs several sensors driven into the forest floor. Another key feature are various home-built collection systems meant to capture leaves and debris that fall off of trees. These baskets, and what's inside them, can help scientists back-calculate the volume of leaves the trees in this area grow in a given year.

Also common in a research forest: Lots and lots of signage and color-coded tags. In order for science to happen, you have to know exactly what you're looking at. When you make comparisons at the same spot over time, you have to know you're dealing with the same plants, or the same section of the woods. Signs help. You can't see it here, but the trees, themselves, are also labeled. In this particular study, every tree has a number that it wears tacked to its trunk like a little dog tag.

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