Near end-of-semester check in

 It's almost the end of the semester and a month of opportunity (and recovery) is just around the corner.  I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the good and bad and maybe plan something for the weeks ahead.

Teaching 

Teaching one and a half new courses this semester. Plant Taxonomy is an upper level course with a 2 hour lab and 3 hour lab (for a total of three credits). I did a survey of plant families in the lecture with these last few lectures going over molecular techniques and plant conservation. The lab is nearly all field trips and students had two collect twenty five plants. I should have spent more time on the front end covering the terms used in identification (e.g., actinomorphic flowers, sympetalous calyx). I'll probably put this forward through the curriculum committee. 

The other course was Tree and Shrub Identification for one hour. It really needs to be longer - one hour isn't long enough to get around campus. Still, I think the students have enjoyed it. We'll see when the surveys come in. 

Taught 1/3 of the Pop Evo course for sophomores. I haven't changed much. Teaching labs as well - these still need to be tweaked. Students do not like simulations compared to hands-on labs (what does that say for remote teaching of labs???). 

Chairing

Behind on a bunch of tasks - including putting in proposals that totally change our major. No kidding. 

Research 

Collecting at Lehigh Gap is wrapped up. We are going to use tissue samples to build a food web and compare it to one we published almost a decade ago (published here).  We're still sorting insects and that is  going really really slow. Plant samples are nearly done and ready to go out. 

Coffee book is done and waiting for it to be published. I have very mixed feelings about it. 

I'm really slacking on getting older material out and working on grants. It's been hard to focus on anything other than developing the plant course. Oi! 

I did move the invertebrate database to Ecdysis (https://ecdysis.org/). Most entries need to be tweaked and I need to go through thousands (just over 8000) of images and link them to the catalog entry.  Yea. And I also moved the herbarium records to the Mid-Atlantic Herbaria Consortium (https://midatlanticherbaria.org/portal/).  The Morris Arboretum is scanning all the specimens (just over 4000) and I will need to link the images to the catalog entry. Yea. 

June 3-7, 2024 Research Recap and Plan

 June 3-7 Research recap

Started out the week visiting out American Chestnut plantings. We first visited our deer-free urban site and 9/9 were still good and growing. Then we visited our deer+urban site and, well, 0/9 chestnuts survived after one week. Only two oaks were recovered. Now here's the interesting thing - the two that were found showed no evidence of herbivory. They were just snipped off at the base. One looked chewed. I have a few chestnuts left over and I think I'll put some out and put a game camera on them to see what's happening to them. There are squirrels at both sites so I suspect it might be some other critter. 

We ended the week at the food web site. Captured a few mice, which is very important to our research. Not only are they omnivores (so flexible diets will tell us what's out there) but we also captured them in our original study. We also captured a Field Sparrow and Indigo Bunting (below). Many many other birds are on the site so more work to do! One of the more interesting things I found was a morning dove nest on the ground! 

This coming week, we're checking on our chestnut plantings, setting out some Audiomoths and game cameras. Should do some shrub and plant inventories as well. The point of all this is to figure out what drives plant diversity in urban woodlots. We need to look at what birds are there (to bring in seeds) and what mammals are there (to consume seeds.. and bring seeds in too). 

June 2024 Research Update - the month of Meh

 I've been in the research season for two weeks now. 

We randomly planted nine American Chestnut seedlings at three sites along a 25-m transect. Two of these sites have deer and one does not and we're going to visit every other week to note the state of the seedlings. We tagged each tree with small aluminum tags. 

We went to one site that should not have deer. It is completely surrounded by dense urban development. If you're curious, check out the end of Court Street in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Yet, there was literally a deer waiting for us when we pulled up. Unreal. I'll need to talk to a local about the deer because I have no idea how a deer would get there. The forest there was utterly devoid of native vegetation in the understory. 

We also tagged a number of oak seedling and saplings. We'll follow these plants for years - I hope. 

This week we'll water the plants, tag some more oaks, and set out a few more audiomoths and game cameras. 

 Summer 2024 Research Agenda

A student asked what research I was doing this summer and I thought I would pen to paper and see how ambitious my plan was. Here's what I would like to work on this summer:

Urban Ecology

As human settlement spreads across the planet, interesting ecological questions arise. For example, with increasing urbanization, any remnant woodlots become increasingly isolated - both in terms of distance from other woodlots and intensity of separation. It is one thing for a woodlot to be isolated by a pasture and another to be separated by a city. Or does it?  

I think of isolated woodlots as islands and the diversity within islands as driven by colonization (by birds and mammals mostly) and extinction (by deer and other herbivores). This follows Robert MacArthur and E.O. Wilson's Island Biogeographic Theory - a theory that has been central to my thinking since graduating from Rutgers in 1991. I plan on making this a research theme for at least two years or longer if other avenues are less productive. 

We examined the diversity of trees in a number of woodlots across Wilkes-Barre that varied by their connectedness to other woodlots. Other factors we examined were the presence of deer, which are though to drive the establishment of seedlings. Eventually I would love to sample birds and see what seeds they are moving. That's later. 

This summer I plan to

• Survey tree diversity in a few more sites
• 10 m radius circles, all woody plants > 2 cm dbh 
• 2 samples per 10 ha
• Plant a few oak seedlings and chestnut seedlings in a woodlot with deer and one without
• I have 10 oak and 40 chestnut seedlings 
• Put down a 50 m transect and plant seedlings at random points. 
• Visit every two weeks until September 
• May need to put down a mesh to protect the nut from squirrels
• Measure shrub and understory plant diversity 
• More camera trapping

I think I can pull this off with about 1/3 of the summer available. I'd like to work on this project Mondays and Fridays. 

Lehigh Gap Nature Center (LGNC) Food Web: Updated

Ned Fetcher and I and a few other authors published a food web from the LGNC based on sampling about 15 years ago. Since then (1) the site has become shrubbier and the soils (I assume) have become more developed and (2) I have learned a ton about food webs and what to measure. Ned and I plan on returning and sampling and seeing how the food web has changed. 

To that end, we plan on

• Doing sweep samples (which collects dozens of arthropods per sample x a dozen samples)
• Running pitfalls (collects a dozen or so arthropods/sample x dozens of pitfalls) 
• Running a few Berlese funnel samples (new for the project and samples arthropods less mobile than pitfall samples
• Sampling birds and getting blood samples 
• Small mammal trapping to get mouse hair samples 
• Hair snares to get other hair samples (either barbed wire or hair brushes) 

Because this project involves travel and planning - I will likely do this Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. 

Catch up: Bug sorting and DNA barcoding

We have thoooooouuuuuusands of invertebrate samples that still need to be processed (sorted into species, photographed, entered into a database. Oi! 

• I'd like to barcode wasps (so much diversity!!!)
• Send off the omnivores to get isotoped
  
  

Rainy day unless a student just wants to tackle this! 

Catch up: papers 

No particular order ;) 

1. Caterpillar paper (oldish, needs reanalysis per reviewers)
2. West GA diversity stuff (really old)
3. West GA bluebirds (really old) 
4. Fire and food webs (new) 

Diary of Thomas Stratford, coal miner, great grandfather

Diary of Thomas Morgan Stratford

Born 13 January 1884 in Bridgend, Glamorganshire, Wales, Somerset, England

Died 6 September 1948 in Avoca, Luzerne, Pennsylvania, USA

Wife was Elizabeth Wilce, who was born August 6, 1888 in Simpson, Pennsylvania and died January 22, 1980 in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. 

Thomas Morgan and Elizabeth are buried in Maplewood Cemetery, Carbondale, Pennsylvania. The headstones are located around the southern 1/3 mark. I was there when my great grandmother was buried though all I remember it that it was a cold and cloudy day.  

I was given this diary by my uncle Tom Stratford, who passed away a few ago. Rather that having the diary sit somewhere in  drawer I thought I was share it as I read through it. I will also add pictures as they are discovered. Dates are a bit of an issue as there are many entries that only have the month and day and some with no date. 

I read through the diary and it is not a daily record. Rather, my great grandfather used to the diary over several years to record different events. I will use this space to put events in chronological order so this is a working document and I will annotate accordingly. 

January 1, [1924]

Entries in chronological order

June 14, 1924 

"Rec'd check for 30.00 interest on Gen. Mot." 

August 21, 1924 

"Born to Mr. and Mrs. Kirt Birch (sp?) a baby girl at Emergency Hospital Carbondale" 

September 28, 1924 

"Mrs Brain had baby christened at Carbondale. Lizzie and I stood for her. 

December 15, 1924 

"Rec'd check for $31.25 interest on Gen Mot

September 1, 1925 

"Started coal strike"

October 1, 1924 

"Loaned H.H. Kudleck twenty dollars $20.00 on this date.  

Feb. Rec'd check for $20.00 from H.H. Kudleck

(Updated 3 April 2023)

 

Wilkes University Arthropod Collection 2022 Summary

 When I arrived at Wilkes University in 2007, we had a collection of about 250 insects, arranged in orders in drawers. Unfortunately, none of the specimens had labels so many were tossed. Around 2011, we inherited hundreds of insects from Mike, a friend of the university that took care of the university and also a school teacher. These insects were also without any collection information and many were thrown out. Heart breaking but what is the value of a specimen without any data? 

In the meantime, we were collecting arthropods as part of study of grassland restoration (see https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/rec.12202), then as a study of the effects of grassland management on diversity in fifteen grasslands (accepted in Ecosphere). Those samples were sorted to order. Many were photographed and data were entered into Biota. I'm still trying to find the images - my worry is that the file was created by someone that graduated and no longer accessible. Lesson learned. 

More recently, I became interested in the effects of prescribed burning on pollinators and food webs more largely. In the last two years, I must have collected, I'm estimating, about 10,000 insects and we have sorted about 4200 insects so far. There are another 20,000 insects that are still in jars, envelopes, etc. so be sorted. Yep, I have quite the work load ahead of me. I'm sending many samples off to be analyzed for the food web study and we are focusing on omnivores - because their trophic position can tell us about the productivity of a site. 

I wanted to run some summary statistics to both create a benchmark for tracking progress of the collection and quality control. Simply by producing tables, I can catch spelling mistakes and other typos. 

We had 529 collection events entered. That's a pitfall, sweep, or pollinator pan. We do have a few collection entries that are single bird captures and a blood and feather sample is part of the collection. Moving forward, a collection involving birds will be all birds captured at a site during one effort (mist-netting/box check). We also have a few plants - this is different from the plants in the herbarium. These are samples to be isotoped for the food web study. Whole plants will go into the herbarium but tissue samples go into our collection. Not sure if this is best practice but this is where I'm at. 

Here's the summary of our collection 

Entries 

4241 entries

Megan O. entered 970 lines 

Tyler S. entered 948 lines

Cally E. entered 586 lines 

Becca K. entered 398 lines

There were about 10 other people that entered data - all less than 300 lines. 

I entered 238 lines - wow, I have a lot to do to catch up (consider it takes 5 - 10 minutes per insect to enter). 

Taxa

 - 23 unknown phyla (this is an error - unless I really can't identify something to phylum)

 - 2 annelids (worms)

 - 4125 arthropods (no surprise there)

 - 68 chordates (feather/blood, hair, scales)

 - 16 flowering plant samples (should be many many more)

 - 6 mollusks (all snails)

 - 1 fern (a bracken fern, a common field fern) 

 Of the arthropods 

    - 185 spiders

    - 88 collembola (springtails)

    - 14 millipedes (this number seems really low but it's odd how few go into pitfalls compared to how many you see in the forest)

    - 4 snails 

    - 3828 insects 

    - 3 Malacostraca (rolly-polly) 

Of the insects

    - 2 cockroaches (much much lower than expected)

    - 428 Coleoptera (beetles)

    - 1201 Diptera (flies)

    - 574 Hemiptera (true bugs)

    - 1239 Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, ants - most of these are ants and tiny wasps)

    - 88 Lepidoptera (most were hand captures but also include a number of micromoths that are a few mm) 

    - 17 Odonata (dragonflies - all are hand captures)

    - 138 Orthoptera (grasshoppers and crickets, mostly older samples from sweepnets) 

    -  50 mistakes (wrong orders listed with Insecta as the class, space added in front of the name or after)

    - identified to species 320 (not awesome) 

Moving forward

    - add many more species identities 

    - fix all the errors

    - send hundreds of samples off to be isotoped (~ 850 samples have isotope data) 

    - sort and enter thousands of insects! 

I do need a bunch of https://www.forestry-suppliers.com/p/53598/52861/cornell-university-insect-cabinet-drawer.  And time.. lots of time. 

one of the micromoths

 rove beetle

         

 

 

Flash back and slow forward to 2023

I haven't posted in over a year. Remarkable. It recently dawned on me how little time I seem to have for anything. The College of Science and Engineering was dissolved while I was away in the Galapagos so my position as dean (and associate dean) ended. Despite not having extra responsibilities (because I was teaching full-time as well) I feel like I have less time. Haven't been to the gym at all (and I feel and look it), I haven't sat down to do stamp stuff, and I haven't read a book. 

I did 

• get to the Galapagos and Ecuador in May with a number of students and that well very well. 
• have pretty good research field seasons. In 2021, we focused on pollinator pans in burned, cut, and reference forests. In 2022, we focused on collecting specimens for an isotope study
• have a paper get accepted into Ecosphere - this was originally rejected from Ecological Application
• get promoted to full professor

So not a spectacular year but a good year. I'll try and post the best photos from the Ecuador trip at some point. So time to access who I am and my increasing limits (i.e., how long can I stay awake or stomp through the forest). So here's are my goals to 2023

I will

• Finish off the three chapters for the coffee book 
• Submit an old data paper and a new data paper. Old data = my dissertation research from GA. New data is the yellow pollinator pan data. Would be great to get a third paper out but I don't want to be greedy
• Push to have a big STEM event at Wilkes in May 
• Sort, sort, sort, and sort bugs. We're sitting on thousands of insects from dozens of samples. At worst, we will have samples for a food web study. At best... well... good question. Many jars are dried up. Not sure what the best scenario is. 
• Apply for a sabbatical. Because, man, am I due. 
• Start doing those things I miss doing - like this blog!