As responsible energy usage is becoming more and more a part of the public conscience, a key practice of this idea emerges. Specifically, using the energy we do have with maximum efficiency. While the laws of thermodynamics remain a limiting factor, research has been done to show that properties of...
Microbial natural products represent a massive repository of unique chemical scaffolds with corresponding diverse biological functions. However, in the past decade the development of natural products into new therapeutics has dwindled, in part due to the challenges posed by high rediscovery rates and low throughput associated with classical bioassay-guided fractionation...
Since the early 1900s, widespread agricultural abandonment has occurred in western New York leading to a general increase in forested areas through old-field succession. Even-aged stands typically follow these large-scale disturbances, resulting in a pattern of development with identifiable stages (Oliver 1980). At each stage, changes in vegetation dynamics encourage...
Loss of biodiversity due to the effects of climate and land-use change may have implications for pollination services. Disruption to phenological synchronicity or a reduction in the overlap in species distributions of plants and their pollinators may reduce floral resources to pollinators, forcing them to move farther distances. If pollinators...
Society derives many critical and irreplaceable values from forests. With a growing global human population and rates of consumption, forests are under increasing pressure to provide all these values simultaneously. To meet societal demands for wood products, tree plantations are becoming increasingly common and are replacing native forests. Yet, forests...
Population trends and patterns in species distributions are the major currencies used to examine responses by biodiversity to changing environments. Effective conservation recommendations require that models of both distribution dynamics and population trends accurately reflect reality. However, identification of the appropriate temporal and spatial scales of animal response, and then...
As the global demand for natural resources increases, more land will be intensively managed for the production of commodities such as timber, with potential consequences to biodiversity, ecological functioning and ecosystem services provided to society. Although there is strong consensus that intensive land management practices can negatively affect biodiversity, less...
Recent evidence suggests that population declines of some avian species may be driven primarily by reduced quantity and diversity of early-successional habitat on the breeding grounds. Increasing intensity of forest management on private lands and decreased harvest rates on federal lands has resulted in a loss of the diverse early-successional...
Contemporary forest management involves a more extensive and diverse suite of management objectives than was the case throughout much of the Twentieth Century. Heightened public and political awareness of local and global biodiversity decline, and interest in arresting these trends, has increased the emphasis on broad-based biodiversity conservation as an...