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Summer Research Project 2019

• Title: Decades to Centuries: What is Happening Inside Transitional Forests at the Harvard Forest?
• Group Project Leader: Neil Pederson
• Mentors: Tessa Mandra; Neil Pederson
• Collaborators: David Orwig
• Project Description:

  Anthropogenic climatic change is expected to have significant impacts on the structure, function, and composition of ecosystems. Broadly, a species near the northern (southern) end of its distributional range would be less (more) vulnerable to warming and associated climatic changes, notably increased evapotranspiration and drought stress. The Harvard Forest, embedded in the tension zone of New England--a wiggly ribbon of the regional landscape where two major forest types meet--is home to small ecosystems that are represented by either more northern and southern systems or others whose species mix represents an amalgam of species from both regions.
  
  One to two students will work with Neil and Harvard Forest scientists and staff to study forest stands with significant elements of shagbark hickory (Carya ovata), a southern species near its northern range margin. The landscape of study, the Harvard Forest’s Slab City Tract, contains at least 15 species, including eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis), a species undergoing a transition due to the impact of the non-native insect, hemlock woolly-adelgid, and paper birch (Betula papyrifera), a species near its southern range margin. The student (s) will then investigate the drivers of shagbark hickory growth since the early 1900s in two plots. The work conducted by the Transitional Forest student(s) will reveal important insight into these systems today and provide additional baseline data to the Harvard Forest permanent plot network for the future. Notably, the presence of shagbark hickory, eastern hemlock, and paper birch in these permanent plots indicates these forests will be influenced by compounded, interactive global change drivers: climate change and non-native species. As such, this work will be an important component of the HF sixth Long-term Ecological Research project.
  
  Skills related to measuring forests and the ability to work with tree-ring data, plot-level forest measurements, and meteorological data will be developed. Slab City is a short 3-mile drive to the southern end of the HF headquarters and then a short walk up a small hill. Efficient and motivated students will have the opportunity to not only learn how to process tree increment cores in the lab, but to place a regional context for the growth of the HF samples with other collections made throughout the region.

• Readings:

  Foster, J.R., Finley, A.O., D'amato, A.W., Bradford, J.B. and Banerjee, S., 2016. Predicting tree biomass growth in the temperate–boreal ecotone: Is tree size, age, competition, or climate response most important?. Global change biology, 22(6), pp.2138-2151.
  
  Graumlich, L.J., 1993. Response of tree growth to climatic variation in the mixed conifer and deciduous forests of the upper Great Lakes region. Canadian Journal of Forest Research, 23(2), pp.133-143.

• Research Category: Regional Studies, Physiological Ecology, Population Dynamics, and Species Interactions, Historical and Retrospective Studies