Just finished reading "Bar-Massada, A., V. C. Radeloff and S. I. Stewart, 2014. Biotic and Abiotic Effects of Human Settlement in the wildland-Urban Interface. Bioscience 64, 429-437."
This paper provides an overview of the changes in ecosystems where wildlands meet or are intermixed with human settlement. It's a bit too brief but provides some great material. It asked some of the same questions I did here about the effects of urbanization but provides more insight. Nothing surprising but nice to see the sources: more generalists, food webs are altered, etc. I take from these papers, however, that food web studies are just getting started. Very cool. Ideas, ideas, ideas.
They also point out that invasive plants radiate out from human settlement and the interaction with habitat modification, primarily edge effects, and how that benefits invasive species.
We plan on looking at frugivory across the urban gradient this summer. We have an army of "poop traps" ready to be set out.
I'm excited for this summer. Should be interesting!
Just gave a very quick read of "Ordonez, A., S. Martinuzzi, V. C. Radeloff and J. W. Williams, 2014. Combined speeds of climate and land-use change of the conterminous US until 2050. Nature Climate Change 4, 811-816."
Ordonez and colleagues present a short article representing lots of work mapping climate change and land use across the US. They examined where climate change and land use change would affect ecosystem most rapidly as independent and combined effects.
For climate change, the strongest effects will be seen in the Great Plains where there will be no topographic refugia for a warming climate. There will also be high rates of land use change, much of urbanization. So the Plains are screwed. The West appears to have relatively low rates of change for climate and land use. The ne and se US will be mixed.
Just read a paper from the same group that I did my PhD with. Most of the paper wasn't very relevant to my own work but I did find some inspiration.
The paper was Styers, D. M., A. H. Chappelka, L. J. Marzen and G. L. Somers, 2010. Scale matters: Indicators of ecological health along the urban-rural interface near Columbus, Georgia. Ecological Indicators 10, 224-233.
They looked at measures of road density and fragmentation along with population measures at different spacial extents. I was disappointed that there was any ecology in this paper. Oh well.
What Styers said that piqued my interest was this "Urbanization effects on natural resources extend well beyond the boundaries of urbanized areas into surrounding wildlland environments (Macie and Hermansen 2002)." This is cool and I haven't thought much about this. How far do urbanization effects extend beyond what is recognized as being urban? I imagine there are biological and abiotic effects that have the potential to participate in such a phenomenon. How far does the urban heat island radiate across the landscape? Or is it smaller than the urban footprint. I also would think that cats, dogs, and rats have an effect beyond the footprint.
Then there are questions of ecosystem services/processes. If urban areas have more invasive plants are birds moving them into the larger landscape? Are hummingbirds moving pollen out of urban areas? Lots of ideas.
Working on a paper from my work in western Georgia (USA) and catching up on the literature. Been feeling a bit scattered and not sure where my career is going (urbanization?, grasslands?, tropical?, isotopes?, DNA barcoding?, acorns?, blue jays?).
I could make a career of catching up and I should. I owe it to the people that have invested in me.
Anyways, just finished Valiela, I. and P. Martinetto, 2007. Changes in Bird Abundance in Eastern North America: Urban Sprawl and Global Footprint? BioScience 57, 360-370.
I typically read and underline important parts then type in those parts in Endnote. Horribly inefficient. I know some people highlight the pdf. I get it back when I do a search and print out the Endnote hits with annotations. That way I can skim through the annotations and get the gist of the paper that I think is important rather than reading the abstract.
Here's some of the important findings:
1. Overall, birds are declining in North America but probably not who you expected (long-distance migrants of the forest)
2. Large declines in open habitat birds (their categorization is a little wonky) that are residents or short-distance migrants
3. Wetland birds decline as well
4. Most forest birds, especially residents, are increasing
5. Edge birds (including the Starling?) are not increasing despite what is an increase in the urban-wildland interface
My daughter goes to Connecticut College and I was up last weekend to pick her up and I stopped at Rocky Neck State Park in East Lyme, CT. The day was cold and overcast so not too great for birding. Picked up Horned Larks, Tree Sparrows, Common Loon, and a Surf Scoter. Brant (top) were at a nearby beach and a bunch of Snowy Egrets (bottom) were at the entrance to the park.
In 2002, I started keeping track of what papers I've been reading by adding the keyword read with the year so if I searched my Endnote files for "read10" I would get all the papers that I read in 2010. Below I graph the number of papers I've read (black) and the the papers I've published (red).
The depressing thing, to me, is the number of years with 0 papers. That would be five out of fourteen years. Hate that. Hard to see in the graph below but I had five papers in 2015. I have at least seven papers I can get out so time to get my ass in gear.
I had my qualifying exams in 2002 and I read a ton then and that's the giant peak early on. Definitely a decay in the number of papers read but there's no correlation between papers read and my output. I've read more papers in the last two years than what is shown because I've gotten lazy in using my keywords and I've focused on the discussion.
This frames my goals for the year. Get a few papers out and read more. And teach. And do outreach. And have a life.
