Summer Student Publishes Invasive Species Research

2009 Harvard Forest Summer Research Program student Jenna Turner has co-authored a paper using her summer project data. Using fluorescent powder, she and mentor Matt Fitzpatrick simulated the dispersal of an invasive insect (the hemlock woolly adelgid) in a hemlock forest understory. The clumps of powder, which are larger than the insect but easier to detect in the forest understory, generally spread to a radius within 25 meters of the host tree, but some spread hundreds of meters away, suggesting new implications for the spread potential of this invasive pest.

Read Simulating the dispersal of hemlock woolly adelgid in the temperate forest understory from Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata.