Current Events
Dr. Aaron M. Ellison
Senior Research Fellow in Ecology
Harvard Forest
Petersham, MA
"Things Fall Apart: Land-Use History, Non-Native Insects, Climatic Change, and the Decline of a Forest Foundation Species"
Mark your calendar for the next NEBC Meeting on October 13, 2018, at Harvard Forest, Petersham, MA with lecture by Dr. Aaron Ellison.
Abstract: Foundation species create and define particular ecosystems, control in large measure the distribution and abundance of associated flora and fauna, and modulate core ecosystem processes. In forests, foundation species are large, long-lived, late-successional trees whose ecological characteristics and functions rarely co-occur in other species. In New England, eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) is the foundation species, but it is declining and dying throughout its range because of additive and interactive effects of climatic change, the nonnative hemlock woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae), and anthropogenic activities. In this talk, I describe aspects of eastern hemlock's unique ecological characteristics that contribute to its foundational role and discuss data from historical reconstructions, ongoing observations, and manipulative experiments at Harvard Forest and throughout southern New England aimed at understanding the structure and dynamics of the forests of our future.
Bryan Connolly, Dov Sax, Jesse Bellemare
2018 Fernald Awards
Congratulations to Jesse Bellemare, Bryan Connolly, and Dov F. Sax, this year's Fernald Award winners for their article "Climate change, managed relocation, and the risk of intra-continental plant invasions: A theoretical and empirical exploration relative to the flora of New England" published in Rhodora 119(978):73-109. 2017. The paper can be found here. Members should use BioOne portal for free access.
