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June 2, 2015

Film Shows the Story of Climate Change, Told By One Tree

Witness Tree by Lynda Mapes

During her Bullard Fellowship at the Forest, journalist Lynda Mapes has been taking a long look at a single tree: a tagged, tracked, 100-year-old red oak. A new short film by Patrick Wellever and colleagues from the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT highlights

June 1, 2015

HF Schoolyard Ecology Teachers Earn Top Honors

Winner of the Overlook Award

For over a decade, K-12 teachers in the Harvard Forest Schoolyard Ecology Program have been working with scientists to incorporate hands-on field science into their classrooms. This year, two of our 72 active teachers were honored at the Massachusetts State House for excellence in environmental education.

Teacher Joann Mossman was one of only six teachers in the state to win "First

May 21, 2015

Bullard Spotlight: Diana Tomback and Foundation Species Loss

Whitebark pine research group at work in Alberta, Canada

Diana Tomback, Professor and Associate Chair of Integrative Biology at the University of Colorado-Denver, has had a unique, two-phase Bullard Fellowship. She spent the winter in HF researcher Andrew Richardson's lab on the main Harvard campus, learning new approaches to assessing the impacts of global change at the forest and global scale.

This summer, she's at

May 14, 2015

New Study: Ecosystem Hotspots Increasing in Mass.

Developed landscape with trees showing fall foliage

All land is not created equal.  Ecosystem "hotspots" do triple duty in the benefits they provide to society. A new study published today in the Journal of Applied Ecology reports that the number of ecosystem

May 12, 2015

40-Year Study Reveals New Insights on Carbon

Walter Lyford's hand-drawn map

The middle-aged forests of the East Coast may not look like carbon-storing powerhouses. But New England forests take in enough carbon each year to offset nearly half the region's household carbon dioxide emissions. A new study by HF ecologist Audrey Barker-Plotkin and Summer Research Program alumna Kate Eisen explores how trees are getting the job done.

The study,

May 4, 2015

New Study: Benefits of Carbon Emissions Standards

Air sampling above the canopy at Harvard Forest

A new study in the journal Nature Climate Change shows that states can gain large clean air and public health benefits from power plant carbon standards. The paper, co-authored by Kathy Fallon Lambert, HF Science & Policy Integration Project Director, also documents how these added benefits depend entirely on critical policy choices that will be made by

May 1, 2015

Keystone Conservation Leaders Trained at Harvard Forest

Keystone Project class of 2015

More than 450 Massachusetts community members have completed the 3-day training workshop for the Keystone Project, held each spring at the Harvard Forest. This month, a class of 24 joined their ranks.

In ecology, a keystone species is one whose impacts on its environment are larger and greater than would be expected from one species. The Keystone

April 30, 2015

Sensor Networks and the Arrival of Spring

Harvard Forest stream weir

The field wireless network at Harvard Forest was recently expanded to enable (near-) real-time data from four stream gages, two wetland gages, and a snow pillow. Data from these stations and the Fisher Meteorological Station are collected, processed, and uploaded to our website every 15 minutes along with 30-day graphs of selected variables. The graphs, which contain about 3,000 data points

April 20, 2015

Bullard Spotlight: Wyatt Oswald on Reconstructing Past Environmental Change

Oswald and Day at hemlock hollow

Bullard Fellow Wyatt Oswald, an Associate Professor of Science at Emerson College in Boston, has been affiliated with the Harvard Forest for more than a decade. Working closely with Harvard Forest collaborators David Foster and Elaine Doughty, he analyzes lake-sediment cores to reconstruct past environmental changes.

During his Bullard Fellowship, Oswald has synthesized various types of paleoecological data

April 14, 2015

International Scholars in Residence at Harvard Forest

Harvard Forest ecologist Aaron Ellison and visitor Shah Khalid

In April, 4 international visitors from 3 continents arrived to conduct research at the Forest in collaboration with HF ecologists Aaron Ellison and Audrey Barker-Plotkin, and Director of Conservation Innovation, Jim Levitt.

Visitor Shah Khalid studies and teaches Botany at Islamia College in Peshawar, Pakistan. He was awarded a scholarship from the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan

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