2013 William Main Seminar Series

2013 Series

Can genetics help climate-proof forests?

March 13, 2013  4-5:30 103 Mulford Hall

Professor Sally N. Aitken, Director | Centre for Forest Conservation Genetics, Co-Project Leader | AdapTree Project

Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences

University of British Columbia

Sally N. Aitken is a Professor in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences, Director of the Centre for Forest Conservation Genetics at the University of British Columbia, and Co-Project Lead of the AdapTree project. She studies the population, conservation, and ecological genetics and genomics of forest trees. She is fascinated by the capacity of tree species to adapt to local conditions across large and ecologically heterogeneous ranges, and for individual trees to tolerate considerable temporal variation in climate over centuries or millennia, and investigates the capacity of populations to adapt genetically to projected future climates. She completed her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley and was a faculty member at Oregon State University prior to joining the Faculty of Forestry at UBC. She teaches forest biology, alpine ecology and conservation genetics, and is involved in forest genetic conservation initiatives in North America and Europe. Sally is happiest when outside traipsing around British Columbia’s mountains and forests.

Cross-ecosystem resource subsidies across the stream-land interface and land-use effects on streams

April 15, 2013  4-5:30 103 Mulford Hall

Professor John Richardson

Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences

University of British Columbia

Many communities are to some degree reliant on cross-ecosystem resource subsidies that link adjacent ecosystems, and there are some recipient consumer species that are obligates. Streams, particularly headwaters, are intimately connected with the landscape through which they flow and carry the signatures of features of that landscape.  Resource subsidies of leaf litter, terrestrial invertebrates, salmon carcasses, and adult aquatic insects contribute substantially to their recipient consumers.  Over the past decade our questions have been refined from simply determining that these resource subsidies contribute to recipient populations, to asking about the timing, magnitude and duration of these resource flows.  Forest management affects many of these processes in a number of ways.  Using experiments at scales from instream cages, to stream reaches to whole catchments, we have tested a number of hypotheses about the importance of resource subsidies and how forest practices affect these resource supplies to and from stream ecosystems.

Monitoring the Urban Forest: Researcher-Practitioner Collaborations to Study Tree Mortality

April 24, 2013  4-5:30 103 Mulford Hall

Lara Roman, PhD Candidate in the McBride Lab

Dept. of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management
University of California, Berkeley

Urban forests have aesthetic, environmental, human health, and economic benefits that motivate tree planting programs. Realizing these benefits depends on tree survival, yet we have very little longitudinal data to evaluate tree mortality rates and causes. In this presentation, I will share results from five-year monitoring projects at two sites: street trees in Oakland, and residential yard trees in Sacramento, CA. Both projects applied demographic approaches to urban tree mortality – techniques commonly used in population biology and forest ecology that have been adapted to the cultivated urban forest. I will also review practitioner-based urban tree monitoring programs by non-profit organizations and municipal foresters across the United States, and a new nation-wide collaborative project to develop standardized tree monitoring protocols. This partnership can provide urban forestry professionals with improved mortality information to evaluate the success of planting initiatives, while expanding the data sets available to researchers studying urban tree population dynamics.