If you are visiting this blog, I need not describe the various benefits that the forested lands of the world provide. For this post, we will zoom in on the northeastern United States, and more specifically, Western New York (WNY). The significance of the very important genus of Fraxinus in WNY forests may also be familiar to most. The ash’s of New York, as well as most of North America and Europe, is under attack from an Asiatic invasive insect introduced here in the 1990s. We can touch upon the impacts of the Emerald Ash Borer and possible Ash restoration, as well as what happens if the ash disappears from our forests.
Read moreLecture 16: Trophic dynamics in Eastern mixed forests
In today's lecture, I'm going to describe trophic dynamics using examples from Eastern mixed forests. Depending on the ecosystem, bottom, middle, and/or top trophic levels may influence the species living in a specific place and actually structure the ecosystem. Changing the abundances of organisms with strong structuring power relays to changing trophic dynamics. As I hike around Allegany state park, I'll go over examples I find in greater detail. Together, we'll look at these patterns and hopefully be able to better understand forest ecology from the perspective of the forest floor.
Read moreA fungus that changed American ecosystems forever, the Chestnut blight (Cryphonectria parasitica)
Within just 40 years of the fungus making its way to our continent, nearly four billion American chestnuts were wiped out. You can still encounter a ghost of the forest floors distant past, in the form of shrub-like chestnut trees emerging from intact roots, not killed by the fungus.
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