All News & Highlights

The National Science Foundation has awarded $465,000 for a collaborative research project involving scientists from Harvard Forest, Emerson College, Brown University, and the University of Wyoming. The research will explore the potential for abrupt shifts in species abundances and assemblages to result from interactions between gradual, long-term changes in climate and episodic drought, fire, or human activities. The retrospective project

Forest harvesting is one of the most significant disturbances affecting forest plant composition and structure in eastern North American forests, yet few studies have quantified the landscape-scale effects of widespread, low-intensity harvests by non-industrial private forest owners. Using spatially explicit data on all harvests over the last 20 years, we sampled the vegetation at 126 sites throughout central and western

HF ecologist David Orwig's work with the Schoolyard Ecology project "Hemlock Trees and the Pesky Pest, the Woolly Adelgid" was featured on the front page of the Greenfield Recorder recently. The article described Greenfield High School students' and teacher Christine Perham's experience with invasive species research in Greenfield.

In April's Ecology, former research assistant Jess Butler and her co-authors Nick Gotelli (University of Vermont) and Aaron Ellison (Harvard Forest Senior Ecologist) reported the surprising finding that the complex food web of macroinvertebrates inhabiting leaves of the pitcher plant Sarracenia purpurea contribute little to the nutrient budget of this carnivorous plant. Rather, bacteria provide the key link between the