(Press-News.org) MADISON - A century spent treating wildfires as emergencies to be stamped out may have cost Central Wisconsin a natural setting that was common and thriving before the state was settled.
Pine barrens once stretched like a scarf around the state's neck, from the northeast down across Central Wisconsin and up again northwest to Lake Superior. As recently as the 1950s, University of Wisconsin-Madison surveys conducted by botany Professor John Curtis and graduate student James Habeck described the sandy, open spaces dotted with pin oak and jack pine and dashed with the lavender of lupine and the purple of blazing star.
"We know that the pine barrens used to be common in Wisconsin before European settlement, but now only about 1 percent of the original area remains," says Daijiang Li, a current UW-Madison botany graduate student. With botany Professor Donald Waller, Li authored a study in the journal Ecology outlining the factors driving a deep shift in the increasingly rare plant communities that once inhabited the Central Wisconsin pine barrens.
Or, maybe, inhabited what was once pine barrens.
"We're talking about a dramatic change," Li says. "It's probably better to say these sites used to be pine barrens. These sites are so similar with the closed-canopy pine forests around them that these pine barrens may be gone."
Li spent the summer of 2012 revisiting 30 pine barren sites in Jackson, Juneau and Monroe counties surveyed by Habeck in 1958. Li could tell that the sites have been untouched by flame in the intervening years -- an important absence in pine barrens.
"We don't have background information on how frequent fires were in this system, but in a study of similar habitat in Michigan they found you could expect a burn every 22 years," Li says. "Based on the information we have from talking to landowners and the Department of Natural Resources and our examination in the field, none of the land in our study has burned since the 1950s."
The most important difference since the 1950s surveys, Li thinks, is the winking out of the sun -- at least from the perspective of plants on what is now forest floor.
About half the land in typical pine barrens is covered by forest canopy. Canopy coverage at the Wisconsin sites in 1958 was around 55 percent. In 2012, though, Li and Waller found trees shading an average of 90 percent of the sites.
"At some point, we began putting out the fires," says Li, whose work is supported by the National Science Foundation as part of a long-term forest monitoring project led by Waller. "And then more shrubs came out. More fire-intolerant trees survived, and they got taller. And with less fuel for fires, the sites became less likely to burn."
In response, the shade-intolerant plants (which, in pine barrens, also happen to tolerate fires well) began to disappear. Li and Waller anticipated that shift and expected plant diversity to fall as fire allowed the forest canopy to spread. They found the opposite to be true.
"Species diversity did not change significantly at all," Li says. "Interestingly, when we look at one square meter at a time, we find even higher diversity than Habeck did in 1958."
The plants present at those sites, however, have undergone wholesale change. Woody species have replaced forbs like aster, and ferns that prefer dim forests are now abundant. Pin oak and jack pine have ceded top tree status to white and red pine and red maple.
In a broader sense, the sites have lost variety. The pine barren sites of the 1950s may have been less diverse on an individual basis, but there was more differentiation from site to site.
"The old sites differed environmentally because of the periodic nature of fire - some burned recently, some a little longer ago, some hadn't for a long time," Li says. "But with fire suppression, the canopy closed everywhere -- leaving few differences from site to site. Overall, that supports less variety and fewer of the rare species that occupy pine barrens. As we found elsewhere in Wisconsin, our plant communities are becoming more homogeneous."
INFORMATION:
Chris Barncard
608-890-0465
barncard@wisc.edu END
MADISON - Portable electronics - typically made of non-renewable, non-biodegradable and potentially toxic materials - are discarded at an alarming rate in consumers' pursuit of the next best electronic gadget.
In an effort to alleviate the environmental burden of electronic devices, a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers has collaborated with researchers in the Madison-based U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) to develop a surprising solution: a semiconductor chip made almost entirely of wood.
The research team, led by UW-Madison ...
Boulder, Colo., USA - Lithosphere articles posted 13 and 21 May cover several fascinating locations and geodynamic processes. One study investigates the kinematic evolution of the Himalayan orogen at a site in Nepal. Another paper addresses the "unroofing" of the Klamath Mountains in northern California/southern Oregon, USA. In the East African Rift area, researchers are examining how vegetation mediates slope erosion. Another group focusses on the largest salt lake of the Mediterranean region, Lake Tuz, Turkey.
All recently posted Lithosphere articles are listed below.
Abstracts ...
Stem cell transplant is essential in the care of many blood cancers, but leaves patients requiring in-home care for months after. Frequently the role of caregiver falls to family or other committed members of the patient's support network. Previous work shows dramatically increased stress in cancer caregivers, directly impacting the caregiver and indirectly impacting the cancer patient via reduced quality of care. A randomized control trial funded by the National Cancer Institute by members of the University of Colorado Cancer Center, published in the journal Bone Marrow ...
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Leading the way are eight oral abstract and poster presentations on melanoma for which an NYU Langone researcher is either a senior, lead or contributing author. While many of these studies are multi-institutional, five poster presentations are led by the Perlmutter ...
Despite early promise of benefits, soy doesn't help lung function
Lifestyle and diet may also affect asthma control
Study highlights importance of placebo-controlled studies
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The paper, published May 26 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), highlights the ...
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The Institute of Medicine's report on improving the quality of care near the end of life highlights the need for supporting family caregivers. Core components of high-quality hospice care include counseling services for family members before and ...
Delayed clamping of the umbilical cord to help prevent iron deficiency in infancy was associated with improved scores in fine-motor and social skills in children at age 4, particularly in boys, although it was not associated with any effect on overall IQ or behavior compared with children whose cords were clamped seconds after delivery, according to an article published online by JAMA Pediatrics.
Iron deficiency is a global health issue among preschool children associated with impaired neurodevelopment that can affect cognitive, motor and behavioral abilities. Delaying ...
In an analysis that included more than 70,000 participants from 13 studies, subclinical hyperthyroidism was associated with an increased risk for hip and other fractures including spine, according to a study in the May 26 issue of JAMA. Subclinical hyperthyroidism is a low serum thyroid-stimulating hormone concentration in a person without clinical symptoms and normal thyroid hormone concentrations on blood tests.
Overt hyperthyroidism is an established risk factor for osteoporosis and fractures. Associations between subclinical thyroid dysfunction and fractures are unclear ...
Although some data have suggested that supplementation with soy isoflavone may be an effective treatment for patients with poor asthma control, a randomized trial that included nearly 400 children and adults found that use of the supplement did not result in improved lung function or clinical outcomes, including asthma symptoms and episodes of poor asthma control, according to a study in the May 26 issue of JAMA. Soy isoflavones are plant (soybean) derived chemicals that have anti-oxidant effects.
Increases in asthma prevalence and severity over the last several decades ...
Individually rare but collectively common intermediate-size copy number variations may be negatively associated with educational attainment, according to a study in the May 26 issue of JAMA. Copy number variations (CNVs) are regions of the genome that differ in the number of segments of DNA.
The Database of Genomic Variants catalogs approximately 2.4 million DNA CNVs. Some of them have been previously implicated as causal of a wide variety of traits and conditions. According to background information in the article large (defined as larger than 500 kb), recurrent CNVs ...
