• Premise of the Study: Tropical liana abundance has been increasing over the past 40 yr, which has been associated with reduced
rainfall. The proposed mechanism allowing lianas to thrive in dry conditions is deeper root systems than co-occurring trees,
although we know very little about the fundamental hydraulic physiology...
Biodiversity loss is of global concern, and is due in part to deforestation and high consumer demand for wood and wood products. The neotropical tree species Cedrela odorata (“Spanish cedar” or “cedro”) is economically valuable for its wood and faces threats of overexploitation. Due to strong similarities in wood features...
To detect and avoid illegal logging of valuable tree species, identification methods for the origin of timber are necessary. We used next-generation sequencing to identify chloroplast genome regions that differentiate the origin of white oaks from the three continents; Asia, Europe, and North America. By using the chloroplast genome of...
Molecular phylogenetic and chemical analyses, and morphological characterization of collections of North American Paraisaria specimens support the description of two new species and two new combinations for known species. P. cascadensis sp. nov. is a pathogen of Cyphoderris (Orthoptera) from the Pacific Northwest USA and P. pseudoheteropoda sp. nov. is...
Revised April 1982. Facts and recommendations in this publication may no longer be valid. Please look for up-to-date information in the Sea Grant Catalog: http://seagrant.oregonstate.edu/publications
Pollination is an essential ecosystem service that sustains functioning ecosystems and aids in food production. In response to recent, widespread declines of managed and native bee populations, many land managers have shown interest in developing conservation and restoration plans for enhancing native bee habitat. However, there is a lack of...
Understanding how intra-specific differences in plant traits mediate vulnerability to herbivores of relevant habitat-forming plants is vital to attain a better knowledge on the drivers of the structure and functioning of ecosystems. Such studies, however, are rare in seagrass-mesograzer systems despite the increasingly recognized relevance of mesograzers as seagrass consumers....
The cultivated strawberry, Fragaria Xananassa, is one of the youngest domesticated plants. Its 18th century origin via hybridization in Europe between the North American F. virginiana and the South American F. chiloensis was documented by the botanist Antoine Nicolas Duchesne. His 1766 “Natural History of Strawberries” is an extraordinary work...
Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) inhabits an expansive range in western North America, and it is a keystone species of subalpine environments. Whitebark is susceptible to multiple threats – climate change, white pine blister rust, mountain pine beetle, and fire exclusion – and it is suffering significant mortality range-wide, prompting the...
Despite knowledge that concerted evolution of high-copy loci is often imperfect,
studies that investigate the extent of intragenomic polymorphisms and comparisons
across a large number of species are rarely made. We present a bioinformatic pipeline
for characterizing polymorphisms within an individual among copies of a high-copy
locus. Results are presented...
Premise of the study: Triassic and Jurassic fossils record structural changes in conifer seed cones through time, provide the earliest evidence for crown-group conifer clades, and further clarify sister-group relationships of modern conifer families. A new and distinct seed-cone from the Isle of Skye in western Scotland provides the oldest...
Published March 1980. Facts and recommendations in this publication may no longer be valid. Please look for up-to-date information in the Sea Grant Catalog: http://seagrant.oregonstate.edu/publications
This study is believed to be the first of its kind to characterize culturable fungal endophytes from the wood of Populus trichocarpa, and to examine the potential of inducible resistance and secondary chemistry as specific host factors that shape fungal endophytic communities in wood. To do so, more than seventy...
Key message Leyland cypress, an intergeneric hybrid, produces the same volatile heartwood compounds as its parental taxa, yellow-cedar and Monterrey cypress. However, the proportion of total sesquiterpenes and some of the individual components appear unique to their respective heartwoods.
Context Leyland cypress, xHesperotropsis leylandii is an intergeneric hybrid between yellow-cedar,...
Cenococcum is a genus of ectomycorrhizal Ascomycota that has a broad host range and geographic distribution. It is not known to produce either meiotic or mitotic spores and is known to exist only in the form of hyphae, sclerotia and host-colonized ectomycorrhizal root tips. Due to its lack of sexual...
Delimiting species boundaries among closely related lineages often requires a range of independent data sets and analytical approaches. Similar to other organismal groups, robust species circumscriptions in fungi are increasingly investigated within an empirical framework. Here we attempt to delimit species boundaries in a closely related Glade of lichen-forming fungi...
PREMISE OF THE STUDY: We report the de novo assembly and characterization of the transcriptomes of Brachypodium sylvaticum
(slender false-brome) accessions from native populations of Spain and Greece, and an invasive population west of Corvallis,
Oregon, USA.
METHODS AND RESULTS: More than 350 million sequence reads from the mRNA libraries...
Fusarium proliferatum is a fungus found in soils which produces the mycotoxin group known as fumonisins. Of human concern due to hepato-, nephro- and neurotoxicity, the threat of fumonisins lies within several food items, including corn, wheat sorghum, asparagus and, more recently, garlic. Manifesting as ““garlic rot”,” F. proliferatum infection...
Palm leaves represent one of the most important non-timber forest products in tropical and subtropical regions. Brahea aculeata is an endemic palm of northwest Mexico, whose leaves are intensively exploited for roof thatch and handcrafts. As part of a long-term defoliation experiment, we evaluated the effects of different leaf harvest...
FragariaCyc is a strawberry-specific cellular metabolic network based on the annotated genome sequence of Fragaria vesca L. ssp. vesca, accession Hawaii 4. It was built on the Pathway-Tools platform using MetaCyc as the reference. The experimental evidences from published literature were used for supporting/editing existing entities and for the addition...
Full Text:
crop plants. Am. J. Bot. 101, 1711–1725. doi:
10.3732/ajb.1400119
Rohloff, J., Kopka, J., Erban, A
Forest health issues are on the rise in the United States, resulting from introduction of alien pests and diseases, coupled with abiotic stresses related to climate change. Increasingly, forest scientists are finding genetic/genomic resources valuable in addressing forest health issues. For a set of ten ecologically and economically important native...
We have developed VitisCyc, a grapevine-specific metabolic pathway database that allows
researchers to (i) search and browse the database for its various components such as
metabolic pathways, reactions, compounds, genes and proteins, (ii) compare grapevine
metabolic networks with other publicly available plant metabolic networks, and (iii)
upload, visualize and analyze...
Genome-enabled mycology is a rapidly expanding field that is characterized by the pervasive use of genome-scale data and associated computational tools in all aspects of fungal biology. Genome-enabled mycology is integrative and often requires teams of researchers with diverse skills in organismal mycology, bioinformatics and molecular biology. This issue of...
A framework for understanding the synthesis and catalysis of metabolites and other biochemicals by proteins is crucial for unraveling the physiology of cells. To create such a framework for Zea mays L. subsp. mays (maize), we developed MaizeCyc, a metabolic network of enzyme catalysts, proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, amino acids, secondary...
Climate change poses known and unknown risks for coastal communities and also challenges for university faculty and local government staff who communicate about climate sciences. Conceived as a way to move beyond traditional models of science communication, this project involved public and private decision makers in specific at-risk communities in...
• Premise of the study: Colonists of even the most inhospitable environments, lichens are present in all terrestrial ecosystems.
Because of their ecological versatility and ubiquity, they have been considered excellent candidates for early colonizers of terrestrial
environments. Despite such predictions, good preservation potential, and the extant diversity of lichenized...
• Premise of the study: The pathway of radial water movement in tree stems presents an unknown with respect to whole-tree
hydraulics. Radial profi les have shown substantial axial sap fl ow in deeper layers of sapwood (that may lack direct connection
to transpiring leaves), which suggests the existence of...
• Premise of study: In the mixed evergreen forests in the western United States, Arbutus menziesii is able to quickly resprout following disturbance and, as such, act as a nurse tree during forest regeneration. The mechanism for this nurse tree effect has frequently been ascribed to mycorrhizal fungi, but no...
Premise of the study: Seed cone morphology and anatomy reflect some of the most important changes in the phylogeny and evolutionary biology of conifers. Reexamination of the enigmatic Jurassic seed cone Pararaucaria patagonica reveals previously unknown systematically informative characters that demonstrate affinities with the Cheirolepidiaceae. This paper documents, for the...
Premise of the study: Pinaceae and nonpinoid species are sister groups within the conifer clade as inferred from molecular systematic comparisons of living species and therefore should have comparable geological ages. However, the fossil record for the nonpinoid lineage of extant conifer families is Triassic, nearly 100 million years older...
Molecular phylogenctic analyses indicate that the monophyletic classes Orbiliomycetes and Pezizomycetes are among the earliest diverging branches of Pezizomycotina, the largest subphylum of the Ascomycota. Although Orbiliomycetes is resolved as the most basal lineage in some analyses, molecular support for the node resolving the relationships between the two classes is...
Premise of study: This research seeks to advance understanding of conditions allowing movement of fungal pathogens among hosts. The family Clavicipitaceae contains fungal pathogens exploiting hosts across three kingdoms of life in a pattern that features multiple interkingdom host shifts among plants, animals, and fungi. The tribe Ustilaginoideae potentially represents...
• Premise of the study: Seed longevity and persistence in soil seed banks may be especially important for population persistence in ecosystems where opportunities for seedling establishment and disturbance are unpredictable. The fire regime, an important driver of population dynamics in sagebrush steppe ecosystems, has been altered by exotic annual...
Premise of the study: The Pacific Northwest of North America experiences relatively mild winters and dry summers. For the
tall coniferous trees that grow in this region, we predicted that loss in the hydraulic conductivity of uppermost branches would
be avoided because of difficulty reversing accumulated emboli in xylem that...
Worldwide, networks of plants and pollinators are faced with the threat of climate change. The extent of this threat and the degree of adaptability is not yet understood. In Oregon, climate change is predicted to bring hotter and drier summers which may have consequences for pollinators and the resources they...
Non-timber forest products (NTFPs) have an extensive history of harvest in the United States. The Pacific Northwest is well-reputed as a major source of floral greens for international markets. One NTFP in particular, beargrass (Xerophyllum tenax), has been repeatedly identified as a prominent, high-value species in the floral greens industry...
Plant species in the family Solanaceae are the usual hosts of potato psyllid, Bactericera cockerelli (Sulc) (Hemiptera: Psylloidea: Triozidae). However, the psyllid has also been shown to develop on some species of Convolvulaceae (bindweeds and morning glories). Developmental success on Convolvulaceae is surprising given the rarity of psyllid species worldwide...
Fuel accumulation and climate shifts are predicted to increase the frequency of high-severity fires in pon-derosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forests of central Oregon. The combustion of fuels containing large downedwood can result in intense soil heating, alteration of soil properties, and mortality of microbes. Previousstudies show ectomycorrhizal fungi (EMF) improve...
Premise of the Study: Hybrid zones provide "natural laboratories" for understanding the processes of selection, reinforcement, and speciation. We sought to gain insight into the degree of introgression and the extent of ecological-phenotypic intermediacy in the natural hybrid strawberry, Fragaria x ananassa subsp. cuneifolia.
Methods: We used whole-plastome sequencing to...
Background: DNA barcoding of rain forest trees could potentially help biologists identify species and discover new ones. However, DNA barcodes cannot always distinguish between closely related species, and the size and completeness of barcode databases are key parameters for their successful application. We test the ability of rbcL, matK and...
A perithecial ascomycete, Spataporthe taylori gen. et sp. nov., represented by >70 sporocarps is preserved by
cellular permineralization in marine carbonate concretions dated at the Valanginian-Hauterivian boundary (Early
Cretaceous) from Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. The spheroid perithecia with lumina 330–470 µm
wide and 220–320 µm high are densely distributed...
Premise of the study: Bio-ontologies are essential tools for accessing and analyzing the rapidly growing pool of plant genomic and phenomic data. Ontologies provide structured vocabularies to support consistent aggregation of data and a semantic framework for automated analyses and reasoning. They are a key component of the semantic web....
Premise of study: Sequence analyses for Pinaceae have suggested that extant genera diverged in the late Mesozoic. While the fossil record indicates that Pinaceae was highly diverse during the Cretaceous, there are few records of living genera. This description of an anatomically preserved seed cone extends the fossil record for...
• Premise of the study: The dramatic advances offered by modern DNA sequencers continue to redefine the limits of what can be accomplished in comparative plant biology. Even with recent achievements, however, plant genomes present obstacles that can make it difficult to execute large-scale population and phylogenetic studies on next-generation...
Full Text:
. Government.
6 Author for correspondence (e-mail: rcronn@fs.fed.us )
doi:10.3732/ajb.1100356
Fuel accumulation and climate shifts are predicted to increase the frequency of high-severity fires in ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Dougl. ex Laws) forests of central Oregon. The combustion of fuels containing large downed wood can result in intense soil heating, alteration of soil properties, and mortality of microbes. Previous studies...
The 12-site National Fire and Fire Surrogate study (FFS) was a multivariate experiment that evaluated ecological consequences of alternative fuel-reduction treatments in seasonally dry forests of the US. Each site was a replicated experiment with a common design that compared an un-manipulated control, prescribed fire, mechanical and mechanical + fire...
Phytophthora ramorum, an oomycete plant pathogen, is the causal agent of sudden oak death, a serious disease of Fagaceous trees in California and Oregon over the last decade. Tanoak (Notholithocarpus densiflorus) is one of the most susceptible host species, but the cause of host mortality is poorly understood. Previous research...
National Geographic’s June 2018 magazine titled “Planet or Plastic?” drew attention to a growing problem throughout the world: ocean plastic. The eight plastic-related articles in the magazine are an example of science communication as a critical method of not only disseminating information but also raising awareness of the marine debris...
The following thesis consists of four sections: a general introduction, two manuscripts, a general conclusion, and an overall bibliography. The two manuscripts report on: (1) discussing the prospects of developing a perennial malting barley and potential alternative sustainable crop management practices and (2) further exploring the contributions of barley variety...
Seeds are an essential component of plant life histories, and seed endophytes have the potential to influence germination, seedling establishment and development. That said, seed endophytes are a relatively new area of study, both in the factors that influence which taxa are present and how these microbes alter plant function....
Ecological restoration is needed to mitigate losses to biodiversity. Restoration success is enhanced through the use of native plant materials that are genetically diverse and locally adapted. Seed transfer zones have been developed to delineate geographic areas where native seed can be collected and distributed with reduced risk of maladaptation....
Quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides Michx) is a species with high phenotypic plasticity and a broad distribution that, in the last decade, has experienced climate stress-induced mortality called Sudden Aspen Decline (SAD). In order to help mitigate the effects of SAD in the future, we need a better understanding of aspen’s...
Septoria canker remains the most important disease of poplars in intensively managed forest plantations. Genetic resistance has long been considered the best way to manage for this disease. Transgenic resistance mediated by RNA silencing against pathogens and pests (HIGS: host-induced gene silencing) has shown promise in other pathosystems but has...
Beginning with the inception of American art history as a formal discipline in the 1940s, the dominant mode of interpreting nineteenth-century American landscape painting has been to view aspects of the landscape as symbols for grand cultural, religious, national, and moral narratives. While this method of interpretation highlights some key...
Local adaptation in plants may hold the key to understanding the level of resilience of an ecosystem and probability of persistence of a species in the face of rapid anthropogenic changes in climate and disturbance regime. Clonal species are especially important in wetlands, one of our most productive and vulnerable...
The topics in this dissertation are centered around the way that trees respond to environmental stress in the climates where they occur. Though forests across the planet are expected to experience change in local climate due to historic and ongoing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, the effects of climate change will...
Giant chinquapin (Chrysolepis chrysophylla) is an evergreen hardwood often found as a shrubby understory component of coniferous forests in the Pacific Northwest United States. Due to its ability to sprout quickly after disturbances such as fire and logging it is often viewed as a pest by forest managers. Like its...
Funding agencies, specifically the National Science Foundation (NSF), are placing particular emphasis on the societal relevance and broader applications of scientific research, otherwise known as Broader Impacts (BIs). Scientists are required to address the BIs merit review criterion in their research proposals or they will not get funded. However, many...
The last century has experienced a marked increase in emerging infectious disease (EID, hereafter) – jeopardizing human, domestic animal, and wildlife health. EIDs are commonly associated with spillover from one host species into a novel host species, with many destructive diseases, for both livestock and wildlife, emerging at the wildlife-livestock...
Genetic sampling is used in many wildlife fields to gather data on populations or individuals. In noninvasive genetic sampling, animals do not need to be captured. DNA can be gathered from hair, scat, or other residue shed into the environment. However, this can result in degraded DNA, so it is...
The reduction in mechanical load imparted on the body during spaceflight presents unique physiological challenges. One detrimental and seemingly unavoidable response to microgravity is rapid bone loss. This adaptation is hazardous not only to astronaut health, but to the success of long-duration exploration-class missions. Skeletal adaptation to spaceflight in astronauts...
Rhizopogon is a large genus of ectomycorrhizal (EM) fungi that grows in association with host trees of the family Pinaceae. We have conducted a series of studies investigating the ecology and evolutionary biology of the EM symbiosis shared between R. subgenus Villosuli and trees of the genus Pseudotsuga. Two members...
Coniferous trees are a major North American crop that has been intensively managed for its commercial value, while also serving as critical habitat for abundant wildlife and as carbon sinks. Having diverse functions, North American temperate coniferous forests have become a research hotspot for numerous scientific studies aiming to integrate...
In intensively managed forest plantations in the northern Oregon Coast Range, herbicides are often applied during site preparation and early stand regeneration to reduce competition for resources for planted conifer seedlings. In addition to reducing competition for crop trees, herbicide applications may affect soil processes including decomposition and nutrient cycling,...
The order Cornales (dogwoods) is the earliest diverging lineage within the most diverse group of flowering plants, the asterids (>80,000 species). Although molecular phylogenetics have significantly improved our understanding of cornalean systematics, early phylogenetic relationships remain uncertain due to an initial rapid radiation. The fossil record of Cornales is extensive...
Neotropical characiform fishes form one of the most diverse freshwater ichthyofauna in the world. Knowledge of evolutionary processes that generated and maintain the immense characiform lineage and morphological diversity is still poorly understood. When did characiform lineages diversify? How have major geological and environmental changes affected diversification? Why are some...
Alcohol is a widely consumed, nonessential, bioactive nutrient with end-organ effects on the skeleton. Moderate levels of alcohol consumption are generally associated with increased bone mineral density (BMD), whereas higher intake levels result in reduced bone formation, bone loss, and increased risk for osteoporotic fracture. Given the negative impact of...
The objective of this study was to identify the varying effects of altering the rumen fluid: substrate ratio on the outcomes of in vitro rumen fermentation. In vitro fermentation is a useful tool for evaluating the energy value of feedstuffs and the effect of feed additives on Volatile Fatty Acid...
The significance of the various carbon cycling pathways in driving the sharp sulfate methane transition (SMTZ) observed at many locations on continental margins is still a topic of debate. Unraveling these processes is important to our understanding of the carbon cycle in general and to evaluate whether the location of...
Morphological filters have shown good performance in various image processing applications. Furthermore, their algorithms are easy to implement in special architectures, with the exception that linear filtering cannot be implemented in many of these cases. In this study, a new architecture and corresponding algorithm, capable of realizing linear shiftinvariant filters,...
BACKGROUND: Triticum monococcum (2n) is a close ancestor of T. urartu, the A-genome progenitor of cultivated hexaploid
wheat, and is therefore a useful model for the study of components regulating photomorphogenesis in diploid wheat. In
order to develop genetic and genomic resources for such a study, we constructed genome-wide transcriptomes...
Little is known about the role that worms played in the lives of modern Europeans. This research strove to combine a multitude of primary sources to shape a cohesive depiction of the role of parasitic worms in modern Europe 1700-1800. The Scientific Revolution played a key role in changing the...
Digitally-programmable filters have been an ongoing research topic for a number of years. The first such filters were FIR transversal filters using Charge-Coupled Devices (CCD's) and IIR recursive filters using switched-capacitor (SC) techniques. Although both techniques achieve excellent results, they require non-standard and/or additional IC fabrication steps. Low substrate doping...
Catfishes are the most popularly raised and consumed fish species in Nigeria. Given changes in the dynamics of the aquaculture sector, this paper estimated technical efficiency and factors contributing to it using data collected from 108 farmers stocking catfish in earthen ponds in the study area. Catfish aquaculture was found...
IS-95, an interim standard proposed for future digital personal communications
systems, uses two levels of encoding of digital data for error control and compatibility
with code-division multiple access (CDMA) transmission. The data is first
convolutionally encoded and the resulting symbols are interleaved and then groups are
encoded as orthogonal Walsh...
Fungi in the genus Tolypocladium are diverse in their host associations, but the predominant ecologies include parasites of the ectomycorrhizal genus Elaphomyces and pathogens of insects. The aim of this dissertation research is to examine the evolution of these fungi and their host associations. To accomplish this several lines of...
PREMISE OF THE STUDY: Mosses, very diverse in modern ecosystems, are currently underrepresented in the fossil record. For the pre-Cenozoic, fossil mosses are known almost exclusively from compression fossils, while anatomical preservation, which is much more taxonomically informative, is rare. The Lower Cretaceous of Vancouver Island (British Columbia, Canada) hosts...
Ambystoma macrodactylum (long-toed salamander) and A. gracile (northwestern salamander) are two common salamander species occupying key trophic positions in mountain ponds of Mount Rainier National Park. The objective of this research was to document and evaluate the distributions and abundances of the two species, relative to habitat characteristics of ponds...
The quest to achieve reliable communication has always existed. Error Correcting codes have made communication systems even more reliable under high signal to noise ratios. A new class of codes called Turbo codes have proved to be more effective compared to the other classes of codes and achieve performance close...
Black raspberry (Rubus occidentalis L.) is a US Pacific Northwest specialty crop prized for its unique flavor profile and nutritional attributes. A major obstacle for the raspberry industry is Black raspberry necrosis virus vectored by the large raspberry aphid (Amphorophora agathonica). Market expansion depends on production, which is currently hindered...
Published June 1983. Facts and recommendations in this publication may no longer be valid. Please look for up-to-date information in the OSU Extension Catalog: http://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog
Today's computer and network communication systems rely on authenticated and
secure transmission of information, which requires computationally efficient and
low bandwidth cryptographic algorithms. Among these cryptographic algorithms
are the elliptic curve cryptosystems which use the arithmetic of finite fields. Furthermore,
the fields of characteristic two are preferred since they provide...
Electron and neutron irradiation effects in InGaP/GaAs single heterojunction bipolar transistors are investigated in this thesis. Devices with different emitter sizes and grown by two different growth techniques were examined. Based on the physics of heterojunction bipolar transistors and concepts of radiation damage mechanisms, the irradiation effects were analyzed. The...
The purpose of this descriptive case study analysis was to provide portraits of the methods college students used to solve probability problems and the factors that supported or impeded their success prior to and after two-week instruction on probability. Fourteen-question Pre- and Post-Instructional Task-Based Questionnaires provided verbal data of nine...
Though currently relatively unknown outside Latin America, Andean root and tuber crops are rapidly gaining interest elsewhere. Tubers are a major food and important sources of nutrition in South America and have potential in countries outside their center of origin. We conducted a two-part study on oca (Oxalis tuberosa), mashua...
Chromosome maps were made of Drosophila gibberosa salivary gland
and fat body chromosomes, and the puffing patterns were compared in
the two tissues for selected times in development. The times were
early third instar (E), late third instar (0, at pupariation
(0 hr), at two hours (2 hr), four hours...
Base isolation is an alternative seismic design strategy in which the primary structures
and their internal components are uncoupled from the potentially damaging horizontal
components of an earthquake by base isolators which attenuate the transmission of
horizontal acceleration into the system. Rotating machines are among the key internal
components of...
Fish ball is an extruded surimi-based product that is popular among Asian communities. In the manufacturing of fish ball, optimum floatation is extremely important for maximal production. Factors affecting floatation of fish ball in water were investigated. The density of threadfin bream surimi paste significantly decreased (P<O.05) as moisture content...
Statistical analyses were used to develop predictive
models of rice blast and to relate the favorability of
environment to disease incidence and severity on different
rice cultivars at five sites in Asia. The WINDOW PANE
program was used to search for weather factors highly
correlated with blast. Stepwise and r-square...
The specific objectives of this dissertation are to determine subsurface flow
behaviors across different antecedent wetness conditions from a top-down perspective
and to mechanistically assess the hydrological controls on DOC and N transport at the
hillslope and catchment scale. The study area is a small catchment where hillslopes
issue directly...
Published June 1985. Facts and recommendations in this publication may no longer be valid. Please look for up-to-date information in the OSU Extension Catalog: http://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog