Check out this interesting article from Emergence Magazine that recently came my way from Virginia Tree Stewards.
They Carry Us With Them And here is a bit about the Virginia Tree Stewards organization: Founded in September 1990 and incorporated in June 1991, tree stewards of Virginia work to promote an awareness of our community forests and the value of trees. Guided by a non-paid volunteer Board of Directors who meet quarterly, the council represents a wide range of professions, organizations and volunteers who are interested in stimulating a public awareness of the role trees and forests play in the urban environment. The Virginia Tree Stewards philosophy, providing a healthy place for forests in our urban communities, requires that we work together to protect and enhance the natural environment. All who live and work in the communities around Virginia affect the condition of the forested parks and green areas, as well as the trees along streets, in yards, and in front of offices and businesses. If you are interested in supporting or promoting the vision of a healthy forest within our communities, the Piedmont chapter meets the second Thursday each month at 4PM at the Carver Center on route 15 in Culpeper County. Send me an email if you have questions or an interest in this group. Barry Buschow fcbarry@gmail.com
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It is now May and Asiatic False Hawksbeard is in the early to mid to stages of flowering in the Northern Virginia Piedmont. In a previous post, I discussed controlling invasive Hawksbeard in wilderness areas and cultivated spaces. Youngia japonica is also a significant pest of lawn turf and will be spread by mowers and weed trimmers when the plant is dropping seed. This plant can be controlled in lawn turf by hand pulling. When it is flowering, most plants come up easily when pulled at the base of the stalk. Pulled plants should be bagged in the later stages of development as they may continue to develop seeds. In the early stages of flowering, pulled plants may be left to dry and die but the stalks of larger individuals should be severed from the tap root as a precaution against the development of viable seeds. When invasive Hawksbeard is in the later stages of flowering, developing seeds and/or dropping seed, pulled plants should be bagged.
A string trimmer may also be used to scalp Asiatic False Hawksbeard in lawn turf. The trimmer should be angled so that the cuts are made through the center of the rosette, obliterating the primary as well as secondary leaves. Another strategy is carefully timed repeated mowing first by raising the deck to make a primary cut and then monitoring the regrowth for a secondary cut, lowering the deck as needed for additional cuts until the plant’s resources are exhausted. Because invasive Hawksbeard is a biannual, carefully timed repeated top cuts is a viable control strategy. However, timing is very important! There is a risk that control efforts, particularly mowing and weed trimming, will aid in the spread of seeds to areas not previously infested. Hawksbeard seeds readily adhere to mower blades, string trimmers, clothes and shoes and may be carried and deposited into unaffected areas. Sometimes it is better to do nothing and control efforts should be abandoned when the plant is dropping seed if there is a high risk of spread to unaffected areas. Please email me with questions regarding this plant or the EDDMapS project at Bkysanchez@gmail.com. Hello and thank you for reading my blog! My name is Rebeca, I’m a land manager working on 130 acres of private property in Madison County and a member of Class X of the Old Rag chapter of the Virginia Master Naturalists. I work year round managing and controlling invasive plant species in diverse landscapes and would like to share with the Old Rag community some of my knowledge and experience through an educational series of journal entries emphasizing best practices, methods, and tools for the control of alien plant invaders. I am also the chapter liaison for the VMN EDDMapS project, which is a statewide initiative to document the spread and distribution of exotic plant invaders. One particular focus of the EDDMapS project in Virginia, in partnership with Blue Ridge PRISM, is the invasion into natural areas of exotic plants that are commonly used in conventional landscaping. It is my hope that these journal entries will also inspire the Old Rag community to gather and submit data on invasives using the EDDMapS application. Asiatic False Hawksbeard Part 1 For my first entry, because it’s April and I know everybody is super motivated to go outside and pull weeds, I’d like to talk about an emergent threat: Asiatic False Hawksbeard (Youngia japonica). Asiatic False Hawksbeard is a biannual with a late Spring to Summer phenology in the Northern Virginia Piedmont. This plant overwinters as a rosette and sprouts yellow flowers usually from a single stalk. Asiatic False Hawksbeard grows in full sun as well as deep shade and is tolerant of very moist conditions along stream banks and boggy areas. In disturbed areas, this plant can form dense carpets though in the understories of forests, you are more likely to encounter scattered plants and patches. This plant often arrives in gardens from contaminated nursery stock, advances to nearby lawn turf and is then spread by the mower or weed trimmer to other landscaped areas and eventually to forest/field edges and other edge habitat. The challenge of controlling invasive Hawksbeard in forests and fields is the multitude of small, runty individuals, which can only be located when the plant begins to flower in late Spring. It is thus best controlled getting well ahead of it in Winter and early Spring by searching and destroying large, easily identifiable rosettes and waiting for late Spring to pull up the runts, which by then have broken through the leaf litter. Control efforts in infested wilderness areas should be directed at reducing density over the widest possible area, preventing the spread to unaffected areas by targeting the perimeters and searching and destroying satellite plants and patches.
Reposted from November, 2020
By Bill Birkhofer Are you seriously considering installing a pollinator garden or meadow in the near future? Well, there’s no better time than this fall and winter to select, prepare and plan your site. Following are some thoughts to help you on your way or reinforce what you’re already doing. Read on - Click Here By Bonnie Beers
Reposted from November 2020 We wanted to create a low-growth meadow in a 3 acre area near our house. Ever hopeful and loath to use chemical sprays, we decided to give this former hayfield a chance to show its stuff. The site had been mowed for hay with little improvements for decades, at least. It was bordered on one side by a small stream and woods border, on a 2nd side by a deeper wood, and on the remaining sides by our driveway and the mowed/planted areas around our house. Along the woods edges, we found natives like sumac, dogwood, redbud, locust, pine and cedar, and hardwoods. We also found a patch of ailanthus, a good bit of autumn olive and some encroaching vines like Japanese honeysuckle and oriental bittersweet. Read On - Click Here
We live in fast paced times where the human definition of long term is often next month. But the ecological and evolutionary processes driving biodiversity play out over periods ranging from decades to millennia. Part 1 of this series discussed the what of biodiversity – what it is and the challenges in defining and measuring it. In Part 2, we’ll discuss how of biodiversity – how it emerged and how it has changed over past millennia.
Looking out your window on a sunny day you’ll notice the different shrubs, trees, birds, and possibly a rabbit in your yard. And when you go for that hike in the park, there will be untold insects, maybe a frog, snake, or salamander. And of course, you can’t forget the wonderful morning smell of the skunk that passed through last night, or the deer quietly grazing in a neighbor’s meadow. What you just experienced in a small way is the variety of life inhabiting the Earth – the biological diversity, or biodiversity, of nature. Biodiversity underlies everything we do as Master Naturalists. At our last members meeting, Amy Johnson, the Director of Virginia Working Landscapes, discussed various biodiversity studies her group is involved with, pointing out some of the ways that scientists (and citizen scientists such as Master Naturalists) study biodiversity and its implications. Scientists, however, have long debated how to precisely define and measure biodiversity. Is it the number of species? Is it the number different functional roles being fulfilled by various species in an ecosystem? Is it the genetic diversity in a population? Is it the diversity of ecosystems and how species come together in different assemblies? The table below shows some of the many elements and dimensions that scientists consider when studying and measuring biodiversity: The figure below shows another way of looking at biodiversity. Notice the three “standard” ways that scientists typically look at biodiversity – genetic diversity, species diversity, and ecosystem diversity – and some of the alternative ways – compositional diversity, structural diversity, and functional diversity. Source: P. Duelli, M.K. Obrist / Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 98 (2003) 87–98 By now you’re getting the sense that biodiversity is much more than the “variety of life.” In some respects, trying to define it is akin to the parable of the blind men and an elephant.[1] In other respects, it depends on what you are studying – local habitats, food webs, a particular species, or a larger landscape or region. For example, a study of a local habitat or niche may focus on biodiversity as the number of different species in that habitat or the genetic variation of the resident populations. If the scale of the study is larger, say a watershed, landscape, or larger geographic region, the focus may be on the diversity of community assemblies or ecosystems present. Studies of food webs likely will focus on the diversity of functions different species perform. These different perspectives on biodiversity (species, functions, communities) are also not independent of each other, but interrelated. A formal definition that attempts to encompass these various dimensions of biodiversity is the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, an international agreement among 150 nations, which defined biodiversity as: “…the variability among living organisms from all sources including, [among other things], terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are a part; this includes diversity within species, between species, and of ecosystems.” This definition recognizes biodiversity as including genetic diversity, species diversity, and ecosystem diversity, among other dimensions and elements. How is Biodiversity Measured? It will come as no surprise that given the complexity of the biodiversity as a concept that there is not a single measure for biodiversity. Most biodiversity measures have two basic components – some measure of the number of entities present and some measure the degree of difference between those entities. For example, biodiversity can be measured by the number of species in a specific area, using such metrics as species richness (how many distinct species in an environment), or metrics such as evenness (how close in numbers each species in an environment is), rank abundance (relative species abundance), and various other species diversity indices, such as the Simpson Index or Shannon Index, that capture the degree of difference between species in a sample. Endemism richness is another type of biodiversity measurement that focuses on the proportion of rare, locally occurring endemic species. The field of biodiversity measurement is a subject that can cover several graduate courses in ecology. To illustrate the problem of measuring biodiversity, look at the illustration below - which of the two areas below do you consider to have a higher biodiversity? The two areas have the same number of individuals (20). The area on the right has more species (8) (species richness), but the ecosystem on the left has greater evenness across species as reflected in a higher Shannon Index. The Shannon Index quantifies the uncertainty in predicting the species identity of a random individual (i.e., the less difference there is among species, the greater evenness). As the Shannon index approaches zero, species differences approach zero (monoculture), hence a larger Shannon Index number is indicative of greater the biodiversity. The two areas might also be compared based on endemic richness. For example, if the ant, beetle, and frog in the right ecosystem were endemic species to that particular local area, then the ecosystem on the right might be considered more biodiverse and worthy of conservation. Biodiversity also might be measured by the variety and number of different functions that species fulfill in an ecosystem, such as primary producers, herbivores, and carnivores. Functional diversity can be measured in a number of ways (Laureto, et al., 2015; Song, et al., 2014). One way is by the complexity and connectivity of a food web and the functional roles in the food web. In Figure 2, functional diversity on the right side would likely be different from the left side (e.g., the right-side area, populated by frogs, beetles, and ants in a pine forest would likely produce different functions and food web structure than the left-side area dominated by crows and salamanders). Apart from species and functions, biodiversity might also be characterized by the degree of ecosystem diversity. Ecosystem diversity is the largest scale of biodiversity measurement, and within each ecosystem, there is a great deal of both species and genetic diversity. In Figure 2, one could study biodiversity by comparing the differences in communities and species assemblies between the left and right side “ecosystems”. An example of ecosystem diversity is the Southern Appalachian region—stretching from West Virginia and southwestern Virginia to northern Alabama. This region has a number of diverse ecosystems which contributes to the area’s high biodiversity. ------------- Fun Fact: Virginia has over 3800 species, including the third-highest number of amphibian species, and the 13th highest number of vascular plant species in the United States. ------------ Within this region, Virginia has a variety of physiographic areas—from western mountains and valleys, to rolling hills, to Tidewater estuaries— that provide many habitats supporting a wide variety of ecosystems. For example, the Clinch Mountain Wildlife Management Area—covering about 25,000 acres in Russell, Smyth, Tazewell, and Washington counties—is considered to be Virginia’s “most biologically diverse [management area], due in large part to the vast differences in elevation on the area” and is particularly known for the diversity of fish and mussels in the area’s watersheds. On the other side of the state, the aquatic ecosystems and wetlands of the Chesapeake Bay and Virginia’s southern coastal environments are sites of significant biodiversity. Master Naturalists and Biodiversity As a Master Naturalist, you are involved with biodiversity at every turn. Stream monitoring and water quality assessments are based on sampling the macro-invertebrate species richness found in a particular reach of a stream. Butterfly surveys record the number and differences in species found in a local area. Volunteer work on native plants, pollinator gardens, and habitat restoration is fundamentally aimed at supporting greater biodiversity. Feeder Watch and the Great Backyard Bird Count help assess the diversity of local bird populations. And that ubiquitous invasive plant removal projects, and more recently our work with Spotted Lanternfly monitoring, are aimed at threats to biodiversity. I am hard pressed to think of any project we undertake as Master Naturalists that is not tied either directly or indirectly to biodiversity. There are a number of resources you can use for further insights about biodiversity – some our listed below in further reading and references. Also, on the ORMN website there are blogs, science research, news articles and other resources on various aspects of biodiversity. In the next installment of this series, we’ll travel back in time a few hundred million years to see how biodiversity has waxed and waned over the millennia. Until then, get out and enjoy the variety of life around you! Further Reading The Diversity of Life, by Edward O. Wilson (1992, Harvard University Press) The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World, by Andrea Wulf (2016, Knopf) Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, by Carl Zimmer (2006, Harper Collins) References Duelli, P. and M. Obrist, (2003). Biodiversity indicators: the choice of values and measures, Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, 98: 87-98. Gaston, K.J. and Spicer, J.I. (2004). Biodiversity: An Introduction, Blackwell Publishing, 2nd Edition Laureto et al., (2015). Functional diversity: an overview of its history and applicability, Natureza & Conservação, 13(2): 112-116, doi.org/10.1016/j.ncon.2015.11.001. Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: Biodiversity Synthesis, by The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005, World Resources Institute) Mora, C.; et al. (2011). "How Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean?". PLOS Biology. 9 (8): e1001127. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001127. Song et al, (2014). Relationships between functional diversity and ecosystem functioning: A review. Acta Ecologica Sinica. 34: 85–91. Doi: 10.1016/j.chnaes.2014.01.001. Tilman, David (2012). Biodiversity and Environmental Sustainability amid Human Domination of Global Ecosystems, Daedalus, 141(3): 108-120, Summer 2012. --------------------------- [1] The parable is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and conceptualize what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant's body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the elephant based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. ---------------------------------- BONUS FEATURE
SERC: Landscaping for Biodiversity: A plant-insect perspective Webinar Recording Also, please find additional resources provided by Dr. Burghardt:
Email: kburghar@umd.edu Website: www.burghardtlab.org Twitter: @plantinsectppl The variety of life on the Earth is an enduring source of wonderment and mystery. Whether you are bird watching in your backyard, counting invertebrates to assess stream quality, planting oak trees and native plants in your local park, or hiking through Shenandoah National Park, the diversity of life is all around you. Its why you look out your window in the morning and stock the bird feeder in the winter. Biodiversity is at the core of everything we do as Master Naturalists. Whether it’s citizen science projects, stewardship, or education outreach, a Master Naturalist must understand the patterns of nature -- the interconnected relationships between plants, birds, trees, insects, mammals and their environment. Without biodiversity, there would be no patterns or relationships in nature to observe. There would be no nature. So how did biodiversity arise, what is biodiversity, and how is it changing over time? In this six-part series, I will explore each month the many facets of biodiversity, what it means for us, and how we can sustain it. The series will cover the following topics:
So put on your wonderment goggles (free with three box tops and a self-addressed stamped envelope) and come along for the ride….. What is an invasive species? An invasive species is "an alien species whose introduction does or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to human health" - click here for more
Spotlight on a local invasive species: Garlic Mustard - click here The cost of invasives, read this article - click here Look up invasive species and lots more at this cool website - click here
Trilliums, bloodroot, violets - many wildflowers of spring in eastern North America bloom thanks to ants. The tiny six-legged gardeners have partnered with those plants as well as about 11,000 others to disperse their seeds. The plants, in turn, "pay" for the service by attaching a calorie-laden appendage to each seed, much like fleshy fruits reward birds and mammals that discard seeds or poop them out. But there's more to the ant-seed relationship than that exchange, researchers reported last week at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America, which was held online. Read More Here. By Charlotte Hartley
Aug. 6, 2020 , 11:00 AM Science Magazine With their dazzling metallic hue, the blue fruits of the laurustinus shrub (Viburnum tinus), a flowering plant popular in gardens across Europe, are a sight to behold. But it’s what lies beneath the surface that’s caught the attention of scientists in a new study. Researchers viewed samples of the fruit tissue through an electron microscope to examine their internal structure. They found no blue pigment as is typical in other blue fruits such as blueberries—just layers and layers of blobs. These blobs turned out to be tiny droplets of fat, arranged in a manner that reflects blue light—a phenomenon known as “structural color”—the team reports today in Current Biology. Below the fat droplets lies another layer of dark red pigment, which absorbs any other wavelengths of light and intensifies the blue shade. The team verified these findings using computer simulations, confirming that this type of structure can indeed produce the precise shade of blue seen in the laurustinus. The striking color of laurustinus fruits may signify its high fat content to birds. Although structural color is well-documented in animals, including in vibrant peacock feathers and delicate butterfly wings, it is rarely observed in plants. What’s more, this is the first time that fats have been found responsible for this mechanism. The team suspects it may be more widespread, and hopes to identify this type of structure in other species. Posted in:
Bird of the Yellow Mask REC Cooperative Living August 2020 The distinctive hooded warbler sings its song through the East and South. Read about it HERE. |
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