Life Sciences Commons^™

Designing A Low Water Use Landscape, Teresa Cerny, Kelly L. Kopp, Maggie Wolf, Debbie Amundsen

All Current Publications

A landscape design should meet the needs of the people who will use and maintain the area while incorporating the site’s existing environmental conditions into the design. Water is a limiting resource in Utah, so designing the landscape to efficiently use water is important. Conserving water in the landscape can be accomplished by selecting low water use plants, designing and scheduling irrigation systems efficiently, grouping plants according to their water requirements, and using hardscaping materials (patios, stone paths, decks, etc.) appropriately to reduce the area requiring irrigation.

Roundtable Series On Innovative Approaches To Land Conservation And Smart Growth, New England Environmental Finance Center

Smart Growth

A series of six roundtable discussions was conducted by the New England Environmental Finance Center (NE/EFC) from January through May 2002, one in each New England state. The objectives of the series were to consolidate expertise in financing and coordinating projects that combine conservation and development on the landscape, and to identify key areas of unmet need that could be addressed by the NE/EFC. Each discussion entailed several case study presentations and facilitated discussion about what works, what doesn’t work, and what might work in financing and coordinating efforts that combine conservation and development. Key areas of opportunity that emerged …

Water-Wise Landscaping, Kelly L. Kopp, Teresa Cerny, Rick Heflebower

Gardening

No abstract provided.

The Ecology Of Lianas And Their Role In Forests, Stefan A. Schnitzer, Frans Bongers

Biological Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

Recent studies have demonstrated the increasingly important role of lianas (woody vines) in forest regeneration, species diversity and ecosystem-level processes, particularly in the tropics. Mechanisms responsible for the maintenance of liana species diversity could yield new insights into the maintenance of overall species diversity. Lianas contribute to forest regeneration and competition, not only by competing directly with trees, but also by differentially affecting tree species and thus changing how trees compete among themselves. In addition, they contribute considerably to ecosystem-level processes, such as whole-forest transpiration and carbon sequestration. As the rate of tropical forest disturbance increases, they are likely to …

Smart Growth And Land Acquisition Priorities, New England Environmental Finance Center

Land Conservation

It is well-known and generally accepted that all undeveloped land in New England cannot forever be protected from development; nor would this be a desirable goal, as continued economic development and population growth are near certainties. For these and other reasons, private land trusts and government agencies generally use explicit criteria to prioritize their land acquisition activities and prospects.

Much land protection in New England and elsewhere, however, has occurred without substantial attention to such land use needs as fostering the best locations for where people will live, businesses will locate, and infrastructure will be built to avoid degrading resources. …

Monitoring Herpetofauna In A Managed Forest Landscape: Effects Of Habitat Types And Census Techniques, Travis J. Ryan, Thomas Philippi, Yale A. Leiden, Michael E. Dorcas, T. Bently Wigley, J. Whitfield Gibbons

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

We surveyed the herpetofaunal (amphibian and reptile) communities inhabiting five types of habitat on a managed landscape. We conducted monthly surveys during 1997 in four replicate plots of each habitat type using several different methods of collection. Communities of the two wetland habitats (bottomland wetlands and isolated upland wetlands) were clearly dissimilar from the three terrestrial communities (recent clearcut, pine plantation, and mixed pine–hardwood forest). Among the three terrestrial habitats, the total herpetofaunal communities were dissimilar (P<0.10), although neither faunal constituent group alone (amphibians and squamate reptiles) varied significantly with regard to habitat. Three survey techniques used in the terrestrial habitats were not equally effective in that they resulted in the collection of different subsets of the total herpetofauna. The drift fence technique revealed the presence of more species and individuals in every habitat and was the only one to detect species dissimilarity among habitats. Nonetheless, coverboards contributed to measures of abundance and revealed species not detected by other techniques. We suggest that a combination of census techniques be used when surveying and monitoring herpetofaunal communities in order to maximize the detection of species.

In Vitro Propagation Of Conradina Etonia, Cheryl L. Peterson, Russell C. Weigel

Ocean Engineering and Marine Sciences Faculty Publications

Conservation institutions worldwide such as the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew (U.K.) have frequently used in vitro propagation (micropropagation) as a valuable tool to support the conservation of some threatened and endangered species. Although many of the endemic species of Florida 's scrub ecosystem are extremely rare, they have not been widely researched using tissue culture techniques. In this paper, the amenability of Conradina etonia, an endangered scrub mint species, to in vitro growth and propagation was investigated using shoot tips. Callus formed and grew rapidly in the presence of both cytokinins and auxins. Rhizogenesis from callus occurred in both …