The Forest and Biodiversity (FAB) experiment at Harvard Forest seeks to understand the consequences of forest biodiversity for ecosystem function and other trophic levels. The experiment is designed to provide a collaborative platform for research that will lead to a better understanding of how changes in the environment affect forests locally and how to better prepare for climate change.
FAB manipulates species richness, phylogenetic diversity, functional diversity, and climatic niche variation within forest plots, including 16 native tree species with varying susceptibility to environmental stressors. The tree species within each family or lineage occupy relatively different ecological niches, including those that are early and late successional varying in their shade tolerance, successional status and range limits.
Our central questions are:
• How do multiple dimensions of biodiversity in forests, including species richness, phylogenetic diversity, and variation in ecological niches of tree species affect forest function, stability, and resilience?
• How are interactions among tree species influenced by their ecological and phylogenetic similarities?
• How do pests and pathogens differ in their impacts on forests depending on forest diversity?
The experiment is planted at Harvard Farm. It includes 277 forest plots varying in species richness, phylogenetic diversity, climatic niche, and successional status, with some plots being monocultures of individual species and others having as many as 12 different species. Species richness levels include 1, 2, 4, 6 and 12 species. The total number of trees in the experiment is 17,728. Plots include different species mixes of Yellow birch, White birch, Shagbark hickory, Yellowbud hickory, White oak, Swamp White oak, Red oak, Pin oak, Beech, White pine, Pitch pine, Hemlock, Red maple, Sugar maple, Sweetbay magnolia, and Tulip poplar. Two of the species, Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) and American Beech (Fagus grandifolia), are under significant stress due to the increasing presence of introduced host-specific pathogens in the region. To better understand how the tree communities interact in the absence of these pathogens, each plot will be replicated to include Beech or Hemlock individuals that have been treated to remove pathogens.
We plan UAV operations at HF-FAB (latitude: 42.522, longitude: -72.182) located in continuous Class G airspace, strictly for research and education purposes. All operations will avoid infrastructure and people, and will take place within established forest experimental areas. We expect to use a DJI drone attached with a hyperspectral camera and LiDAR sensor.