Life Sciences Commons^™

Study Of Basic Wood Decay Mechanisms And Their Biotechnological Applications, Yuhui Qian

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The overall objective of this thesis was to gain further understanding of the non-enzymatic mechanisms involved in brown-rot wood decay, especially the role of pH, oxalic acid, and low molecular catecholate compounds on the dissolution and reduction of iron, and the formation of reactive oxygen species. Another focus of this study will be the potential application of a biomimetic free radical generating system inspired from fungi wood decay process, especially the non-enzymatic mechanism. The possible pathways of iron uptake and iron redox cycling in non-enzymatic brown-rot decay were investigated in this study. UV-Vis spectroscopy and HPLC were employed to study …

Ltreb: Forest Ecosystem Response To Changes In Atmospheric Chemistry And Climate At The Bear Brook Watershed In Maine (Bbwm), Ivan J. Fernandez, Stephen A. Norton, Lindsey Rustad

University of Maine Office of Research Administration: Grant Reports

The Bear Brook Watershed in Maine (BBWM) is a long-term paired, forested watershed research site with each watershed drained by a first order stream through a v-notch weir. One watershed (West Bear) has been treated bimonthly for 12 years with N and S by aerial helicopter applications, with the second watershed (East Bear) serving as the reference watershed. The objectives of this LTREB proposal are to:

1. Study the response of the calibrated East Bear Watershed to long-term patterns of ambient S, N, and base cation deposition. This will be accomplished by maintaining high quality deposition and stream export data …

Tb200: Carbon And Nutrients In Maine Forest Soils, Ivan J. Fernandez

Technical Bulletins

Recent public concerns surrounding climate change and greenhouse gas emissions have resulted in a lively debate about approaches to fossil fuel offsets and carbon (C) sequestration in forests. The forest community sees opportunities for the intensification of the use of forests for markets ranging from forest products, such as fuel or fuel feedstock, to a range of new bioproducts. This report provides initial insights from an ongoing effort to synthesize forest soils data for Maine. The specific objectives presented here were (1) to develop descriptive statistics for C and measures of available forms of the essential nutrients N, P, and …

The Improved Acre: The Besse Farm As A Case Study In Landclearing, Abandonment, And Reforestation, Theresa Kerchner

Maine History

From the vantage of the twenty-first century, it seems remarkable that farmers, working with only hand tools and farm animals, converted over half of New England’s “primeval” forests to tillage and pasture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This period was marked by transitions as farmers responded to new markets, changing family values, and declining natural resources. These forces brought an end to agrarian expansion and caused New England’s iconic pastoral landscape to begin to revert to forestland. A case study based on the former Jabez Besse, Jr. farm in central upland Maine provides a link to New England’s agricultural …

Burnt Harvest: Penobscot People And Fire, James Eric Francis Sr.

Maine History

The scientific and ethnographic record confirms the fact that in southern New England, Indians used fire as a forest management tool, to facilitate travel and hunting, encourage useful grasses and berries, and to clear land for agriculture. Scholars have long suggested that agricultural practices, and hence these uses of fire, ended at the Saco or Kennebec, with Native people east of this divide less likely to systematically burn their forests. This article argues that Native people on the Penobscot River used fire, albeit in more limited ways, to transform the forest and create a natural environment more conducive to their …

Farms To Forests In Blue Hill Bay: Long Island, Maine, Kristen Hoffman

Maine History

Disturbance histories are important factors in determining the composition and structure of today’s forests, and not least among these disturbances is the human use of the land. Land clearing in Maine peaked in 1880 at six and a half million acres, beginning on the coast and lower river valleys and spreading northward and eastward. The forests of Maine’s coastal islands have endured a longer period of clearing than any other in the state. Long Island, located in Blue Hill Bay, was first settled in 1779, primarily by farmers. Sheep-herding, lumbering, fishing, and granite quarrying provided supplemental livelihoods. By 1920 all …

Tb197: Forest Biomass Estimates In Maine:Statewide, County, And Spatial, Kenneth M. Laustsen

Technical Bulletins

In Maine, statewide biomass estimates have increased from 752 million dry tons in 1982 to 980 million dry tons in a 2003 estimate. These estimates are produced using Forest Inventory & Analysis (FIA) data collected during Maine’s periodic and now annualized inventory design. The Maine Forest Service began tracking and reporting on wood flows of biomass in 1986. For the last 20 years (1986–2005) the total annual harvesting of all products has ranged between 6 and 7 million cords, extracted from a standing inventory that is currently estimated to be 277 million cords. The objectives of this current study were …

The Effects Of Chronically Elevated N And S Deposition On The Nutrition And Physiology Of Sugar Maple At The Bear Brook Watershed In Maine, Suzanne Bethers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Bear Brook Watershed in Maine is a paired watershed system; one watershed has been acidified bimonthly with granular ammonium sulfate ((NH₄)₂SO₄) since 1989. The adjacent watershed is used as a reference. This acid deposition treatment presents unique opportunities to look at the long term affects of acidification on vegetation. Acidic deposition continues to be a concern for the health of sugar maple (Acer saccharum Marsh.) in northern hardwood forests. Many studies show a connection between base cation depletion induced by acid deposition and sugar maple decline. In this text we …

The Dandy Scroll, Spring 2008, University Of Maine Pulp And Paper Foundation

General University of Maine Publications

The Spring 2008 issue of The Dandy Scroll newsletter produced by the University of Maine Pulp and Paper Foundation.

Using Dendrochronology To Understand The Response Of Eastern Hemlock To Past Stresses And Its Current Status In Southern Maine, Sophia Demaio

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis (L.) Carr.) is an ecologically important species that is threatened across its range by the non-native hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA, Adelges tsugae (Annand) (Hemiptera: Adelgidae)). In order to understand potential impacts of HWA in southern Maine, we conducted a treering study of 36 sites in southern Maine (York and Cumberland counties) to evaluate how stress events affected eastern hemlock increments, especially after the 1999-2002 drought. The primary objectives were to: 1) create a master chronology and identify reduced growth events 2) model abiotic factors associated with differences in drought response among plots and 3) evaluate the …

Relative Fitness And Behavioral Compensation Of Amphibians In A Managed Forest, Sean Michael Blomquist

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Habitat loss and degradation are two of the most important factors leading to the imperilment of species worldwide including amphibians, but mechanisms underlying these changes are poorly understood. To understand the fitness potential of harvested forests, I conducted studies of a forest specialist, Rana sylvatica (Wood Frogs) and compared these results with those from identical studies with an open canopy specialist, R. pipiens (Northern Leopard Frogs) in response to an unharvested control and three forest harvesting treatments: clearcutting (with removal of all merchantable timber > 10 cm diameter), clearcutting with coarse woody debris retention, and partial harvesting with removal of < 25% canopy cover. First, I used radio-telemetry data collected on 72 adult R. …