103rd Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America: Extreme events, ecosystem resilience and human well-being 5–10 August 2018 Monica G. Turner served as President of ESA for the 2015-2016 term. She is an internationally recognized landscape ecologist, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and received ESA’s Robert H. MacArthur Award in 2008. Her field studies and simulation…
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Lauren Kuehne, a research scientist in the Freshwater Ecology and Conservation Lab at the University of Washington, shares this Frontiers Focus on the 1972 Clean Water Act and a review of progress and trends in freshwater assessments since the passage of this groundbreaking law, from the May 2017 issue of ESA Frontiers. Stories of transformations are fascinating – especially about deserving people who…
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A new paper in Ecological Monographs presents a 700-year dendrochronological record of fire in Trillemarka-Rollagsfjell nature preserve in southern Norway. Burn scars on old tree stumps chronicle social change, from the population crash at the time of the bubonic plague, through a spike in slash-and-burn agriculture, to the rise of the timber economy. Until the modern era, the human mark…
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To restore the grasslands of the Great Plains, a Nebraska ecologist says, bring back high intensity fires Ecologist Dirac Twidwell wants to change the way we think about prescribed burns. The University of Nebraska professor says he can harness extreme fire to restore grasslands on the Great Plains—and, with the help of the Nebraska Intelligent MoBile Unmanned Systems (NIMBUS) Lab,…
Monica Turner, the Eugene P. Odum Professor of Ecology and a Vilas Research Professor in the Department of Zoology, University of Wisconsin-Madison became President of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) on August 14, 2015. She will serve for one year. “It is a tremendous honor to serve as President of the Ecological Society of America, and even moreso to…
The enormous conflagration known as the Rim Fire was in full fury, raging swiftly from crown to crown among mature trees, when it entered the backcountry of Yosemite National Park in California’s Sierra Nevada in late August 2013. But inside the park, the battle began to turn, enacting a case study in the way management decisions and drought can combine to fuel large, severe fires.
Before the colonial era, 100,000s of people lived on the land now called California, and many of their cultures manipulated fire to control the availability of plants they used for food, fuel, tools, and ritual. Contemporary tribes continue to use fire to maintain desired habitat and natural resources.
This post contributed by Terence Houston, ESA Science Policy Analyst Many invasive species can have a domino effect of throwing an entire ecosystem off balance by diminishing native plant or animal species that function as an important resource for both natural ecosystems and human communities. According to the Nature Conservancy, the estimated damage from invasive species worldwide totals over $1.4…
As a Kansas boy, Jesse Nippert spent his youth wanting to escape the state, but found himself drawn inexorably back. Underlying the sea of grass is an interplay of water, fire, competition and consumption as enchanting as any ecosystem—and the balance of forces is shifting.