Senesced Leaves Of An Invasive Species (Lonicera Maackii) Alter Community Composition And Ecosystem Function In Experimental Wetlands,
2023
Eastern Kentucky University
Senesced Leaves Of An Invasive Species (Lonicera Maackii) Alter Community Composition And Ecosystem Function In Experimental Wetlands, Cy Mott
2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference
Secondary compounds produced by terrestrial invasive plants can cross terrestrial-aquatic boundaries via senesced leaves, leading to altered patterns of aquatic biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Prior attempts to examine the impacts of invasive leaves on wetland communities have primarily employed the use of leaf leachates and focal taxa inhabiting relatively low trophic positions, and additional studies are needed to examine impacts on higher-order consumers and potential additive/synergistic effects of leachates and leaf decomposition. Using cattle-tank mesocosms across multiple experiments, we observed that the addition of senescent leaves of Amur Honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii) to native leaves resulted in mass mortality …
The Effects Of Imposed Drought And Nutrient Availability On Soil Microbial Biomass And Enzyme Activity In A Long-Term Restored Grassland,
2023
Kansas Biological Survey and Center for Ecological Research
The Effects Of Imposed Drought And Nutrient Availability On Soil Microbial Biomass And Enzyme Activity In A Long-Term Restored Grassland, Ashley A. Wojciechowski
2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference
Restoring agricultural lands back to grassland aims to reverse many negative impacts of agriculture on the ecosystem including nutrient export from soil and depletion of soil carbon. Planting prairie on agricultural soil promotes recovery of soil microbial biomass and their enzymes, which create demand for nitrogen by microbes to reduce the rate of nutrient cycling and loss. A complicating factor in the development of a restored grassland the influence of several anthropogenic global changes including increasing frequency of drought and nutrient enrichment. Drought has been found to negatively affect microbial biomass, soil enzyme activity and nutrient cycling. Nutrient (often N) …
Effects Of Extra-Pair Paternity On Provisioning Effort And Nest Defense In Male House Wrens (Troglodytes Aedon),
2023
Illinois State University
Effects Of Extra-Pair Paternity On Provisioning Effort And Nest Defense In Male House Wrens (Troglodytes Aedon), Avery Dart
2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference
Some animals form socially monogamous pair bonds in which a male and female mate and raise young together. However, individuals within a socially monogamous pair bond may still mate with other individuals; this mating is defined as extra-pair mating (EPM). Extra-pair paternity (EPP) occurs when offspring arise from EPM. In wild birds, EPM is approximated by EPP. Males benefit from EPP by siring additional offspring without any investment aside from sperm, but the benefits of EPM for females are less clear. Females may gain fertility assurance, access to better foraging grounds, and nest protection from males, as males are incentivized …
Adaptive Plasticity Of Coloration In Response To Environmental Change,
2023
University of Louisville
Adaptive Plasticity Of Coloration In Response To Environmental Change, Karissa Coffield
2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference
When rapid environmental changes occur, different selective forces can create phenotypic trade-offs in which a trait can provide fitness benefits or costs under different environmental conditions. Amphibians are particularly vulnerable to environmental change, and previous research has revealed that some species will plastically respond to variation in temperature and ultra-violet radiation (UVR) by altering their coloration. Divergent selection on coloration may change with elevation and climate induced shifts in temperature because high temperatures are likely to result in lighter color morphs but as elevation increases, UVR exposure increases leading to the prediction that darker color morphs will be more common. …
Endophytic Fungi And Their Competitive Hierarchy And Effects Of Changing Environmental Nitrogen.,
2023
University of Louisville
Endophytic Fungi And Their Competitive Hierarchy And Effects Of Changing Environmental Nitrogen., Haley G. Bryant, Kylea R. Garces
2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference
Endophytes are fungi that live symbiotically within the roots of plants. These fungi can serve different functions within the roots, and are thought to form a competitive hierarchy that allows them to coexist. It is not well established how specific species act within this endophytic dynamic, especially with each other. This experiment looked to better understand these relationships through Grime’s C-S-R model; growing the extracted fungal species in different treatments: control, stress, low nitrogen, high nitrogen, and comparing each growth rate and biomass over a two-week period. The species looked at in this study were extracted from dominant dune-building grass …
Late Cretaceous Marine Vertebrates From The Tarrant Formation, Tarrant County, Texas U.S.A,
2023
DePaul University
Late Cretaceous Marine Vertebrates From The Tarrant Formation, Tarrant County, Texas U.S.A, Aaron Johnson, Kenshu Shimada
2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference
The Tarrant Formation (middle Cenomanian: ca. 96 million years ago) is a stratigraphic member of the Upper Cretaceous Eagle Ford Group in Texas, U.S.A., and consists of calcareous sandstone formed near the East Texas Embayment of the Late Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway, an epicontinental seaway in North America. We examined vertebrate fossils from the Tarrant Formation based on specimens collected through surface collecting and bulk sampling from three localities in Tarrant County, Texas, including the type locality of a pachyrhizodontid fish, Polcynichthys lloydhilli. Our preliminary examination shows that the fossil fauna includes shark species such as Ptychodus anonymous, Archaeolamna sp., …
Pollinators And Flowering Resources In Louisville Urban Green Spaces,
2023
University of Louisville
Pollinators And Flowering Resources In Louisville Urban Green Spaces, Sarah Hobbs
2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference
Urban Greenspaces can appear in many different forms such as parks, urban orchards, and community gardens. These spaces provide important ecosystem services such as enhanced biodiversity, improved soil health, and increased carbon sequestration. Greenspaces such as parks and community gardens have been relatively well studied in the last few decades compared to urban orchards, despite the multitude of ecosystem services that can be provided or enhanced by these orchards. We hypothesize that urban orchards will provide the optimal conditions for pollinator communities because urban orchards normally have the greatest variety of vegetation and flowering resources, which is positively correlated with …
Herbarium Records Reveal Sex-Specific Effects Of Climate Warming On Phenology Of Fragaria Virginiana,
2023
University of Pittsburgh
Herbarium Records Reveal Sex-Specific Effects Of Climate Warming On Phenology Of Fragaria Virginiana, Ethan R. Richardson
2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference
Plant populations tend to be hermaphroditic, but in some cases can diverge into a dioecious sexual system, or one that possesses both male and female members. Prior studies show a correlation between sex systems evolution such as these and ecological variables. These variables impose challenges on plants' ability to propagate and in a dioecious population, males and females have been seen to respond differently to different environmental contexts. What is still being studied is the degree to which biogeography contributes to the sexual differentiation of dioecious species. While evidence supports the idea of a latitudinal gradient contributing to sexual differentiation, …
How Accurately Structure Can Identify Hybrids When Comparing Different Numbers Of Species And Marker Types And Numbers,
2023
Ohio University - Main Campus
How Accurately Structure Can Identify Hybrids When Comparing Different Numbers Of Species And Marker Types And Numbers, Chloe Hendrikse
2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference
Hybridization is a common problem in conservation. It can be difficult to identify hybrid individuals but doing so is often necessary in order to make conservation recommendations. For example, botanical gardens and seed banks want to identify if individuals are hybrids of two or more species to determine if offspring could be used for conservation or restoration, and to analyze the risk of possible extinction via introgression. Our project looks at how well the program STRUCTURE can detect and cluster hybrids, their parent species, and other pure species, which we created using simulations. We build on past studies, which typically …
Air Pollution Is Associated With Increased Stress In Urban Songbirds,
2023
University of Louisville
Air Pollution Is Associated With Increased Stress In Urban Songbirds, Reagan Earlywine
2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference
Air pollution has been suggested to be a major driver of decline in native bird populations. Understanding how air pollution affects avian physiology and how air pollution exposure may be reduced may help develop effective conservation solutions. Here we tested whether elevated air pollution exposure was associated with increased physiological stress response in free-living urban American robins, and whether urban vegetation mitigated this effect. Specifically, we asked whether the concentration of the stress-related glucocorticoid hormone corticosterone was predicted by exposure to two metrics of air pollution: nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and ultrafine particulates (UFPs); and two metrics of green …
Effect Of Functional Trait Variation On Bee Body Temperature,
2023
Bowling Green State University
Effect Of Functional Trait Variation On Bee Body Temperature, Gabriella A. Muller
2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference
Bees are both ecologically and economically important pollinators for maintaining agricultural production and the health of many diverse ecosystems. As our world continues to change, bee diversity and population numbers are declining due to increasing temperatures. Functional traits such as body size and coloration can mediate the effects of such harsh thermal conditions on insect performance. Specifically, bee body size can significantly impact thermal parameters, with larger bees gaining and losing heat more slowly than smaller bees due to higher surface area to volume ratios. To obtain a better understanding of these relationships, we studied the variation in body temperature …
Quantifying The Relationship Between Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi And A Native And Invasive Thistle,
2023
North Central College
Quantifying The Relationship Between Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi And A Native And Invasive Thistle, Nicole Baker, Lucia Vera, Ian Rosales
2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference
Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) associate with 80% of vascular plant roots and are an important part of nutrient exchange. Our research quantified the relationship between (AMF) and native Pasture Thistle (Cirsium discolor) and invasive Canada Thistle (Cirsium arvense). We hypothesized that Pasture Thistle would have a stronger relationship with AMF than Canada Thistle because of the degraded mutualism hypothesis, which states that invasive species have reduced relationships with AMF. For our experiment, we grew inoculated and non-inoculated plants at 10 different levels of soil phosphorus concentrations. Pasture Thistle and Canada Thistle were both facultatively dependent upon …
An Optimal Patch Use Model For Nitrogen Foraging In Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi,
2023
Ohio State University - Main Campus
An Optimal Patch Use Model For Nitrogen Foraging In Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi, Xin Lin
2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference
Optimal Foraging Theory has been widely used to study animal foraging behaviors, but has seldom been applied to symbiotic microbes like arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi. To date we know little about how AM fungi make decisions to forage in different nutrient patches. To help address this gap we here apply Optimal Foraging Theory to understand how AM fungi forage for nitrogen. We focus on nitrogen because AM fungi need more nitrogen than their plant hosts and soil nitrogen availability can shift the relationship between AM fungi and their hosts from mutualism to parasitism. We present a stochastic dynamic programming model …
Effect Of Variable Canopy Cover On Floral Visitation,
2023
Bowling Green State University
Effect Of Variable Canopy Cover On Floral Visitation, Toby Shaya
2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference
Pollinators provide essential services for ecosystem function. Studies aimed at understanding how availability of floral resources impacts pollinators find that canopy cover impacts bees indirectly by affecting the amount of floral resources in the forest understory and directly by changing the thermal environment in which they can thermoregulate. As ectotherms the maintenance of bee body temperature depends on the distribution of patches of sun and shade throughout a landscape, which can be dependent on canopy cover. The goals of this study were to understand how variable canopy cover drives floral visitation patterns in oak savanna found in the Oak Openings …
Scaling Global Urban Greenspace,
2023
University of Kentucky
Scaling Global Urban Greenspace, Kyra J. Liedtke
2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference
Cites are novel ecosystems. Understanding the complex interactions between urban abiotic and biotic attributes is important for managing future urban expansion. Using urban scaling theory (UST) combined with global datasets raises the prospect of deriving predictive rules for scaling urban greenspace with city size. Aspects of the city, such as greenspace, are influenced by several social and ecological factors that scale with a city's size. Empirical data from European cities showed superlinear scaling, in which greenspace increased disproportionately with city size. However, the comprehension of global greenspace scaling still needs to be understood. A macroecological perspective using a scaling approach …
Elevated Co2 Drives Community And Network Structural Change Within Foliar Microbiomes Of Soybean,
2023
University of Louisville
Elevated Co2 Drives Community And Network Structural Change Within Foliar Microbiomes Of Soybean, Connor Morozumi
2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference
Microbiomes within plants can play large roles in determining responses to stress or perturbation, increasingly common in a rapidly changing world. For example, foliar endophytes are known to increase stress tolerance to drought and decrease herbivory among many other effects. How these microbes are likely to respond to global change themselves is poorly understood. Global changes, such as increased atmospheric CO2, which can influence host plant physiological processes, have the potential to directly and indirectly alter microbiome community structure. Here, we assessed community and network structure of bacterial and fungal phyllosphere microbiomes within soybean (Glycine max). …
Preliminary Report On Fossil Marine Vertebrates From The Mid-Pfeifer Shale (Upper Cretaceous) From Central Kansas,
2023
DePaul University
Preliminary Report On Fossil Marine Vertebrates From The Mid-Pfeifer Shale (Upper Cretaceous) From Central Kansas, Alison G. Mieczkowski
2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference
The Pfeifer Shale is a 93-million-years-old rock unit belonging to the Upper Cretaceous Greenhorn Limestone broadly distributed in central Kansas, where it formed in the Western Interior Seaway, a Late Cretaceous epicontinental seaway in North America. Here, we describe fossil marine vertebrates collected from the middle portion of the Pfeifer Shale at a locality in Russell County, Kansas. Surface-collected specimens are largely represented by teeth of some extinct sharks, such as Ptychodus, Cretoxyrhina, and Squalicorax, that are typical for rock units of the Western Interior Seaway immediately above and below the Pfeifer Shale. Examination of microscopic fossils …
Polyploidy’S Impact On Plant-Herbivore Dynamics: Evidence From Experiments With Water-Lily Aphids And Greater Duckweed,
2023
University of Pittsburgh
Polyploidy’S Impact On Plant-Herbivore Dynamics: Evidence From Experiments With Water-Lily Aphids And Greater Duckweed, Hannah R. Assour
2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference
Polyploidy, or whole-genome duplication, is a widespread mutational process in plants with a myriad of phenotypic and genotypic consequences. In addition to consequences incurred by the plant, polyploidy can potentially cascade to alter species interactions. Yet, knowledge of whether ploidy-induced variation has effects on plant-herbivore dynamics is scarce. Here, we test whether aphid herbivores exhibit preference for a diploid or polyploid host cytotype and whether ploidy impacts plant resistance and tolerance to aphids, measured as aphid and plant performance respectively. To answer these questions, we evaluated aphid choice and compared the effects of the water-lily aphid (Rhopalosiphum nymphaeae) …
Historical Climate-Influenced Shifts In Flower Shape And Production Of A Common Annual Plant, Orange Jewelweed (Impatiens Capensis),
2023
University of Pittsburgh
Historical Climate-Influenced Shifts In Flower Shape And Production Of A Common Annual Plant, Orange Jewelweed (Impatiens Capensis), Amber M. Stanley
2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference
Climate change is a major human-mediated stressor that has been altering temperature patterns across the globe since the Industrial Revolution. In the Eastern United States, it has been projected that the average annual temperature will increase by 3-5 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. Such environmental changes have the potential to disrupt key interactions between species. For example, the vast majority (ca. 90%) of flowering plants rely on animal pollinators to transfer pollen between individuals to reproduce. Higher temperatures cause many plant species to flower up to 3-4 weeks earlier in the year, but pollinator activity has not shifted with …
Microbe-Mediated Drought Responses In Plant Communties,
2023
Indiana University - Bloomington
Microbe-Mediated Drought Responses In Plant Communties, Caleb Callahan, Jordan Ziss
2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference
Microbial communities from drought environments have been observed to protect plants undergoing drought stress. A majority of studies have focused on single species; however, effects at a community level have yet to be thoroughly investigated. We asked how plant communities facing drought stress will differ in productivity when inoculated with microbe communities that have evolved under drought compared to well-watered conditions, as well as how biomass and trait responses vary across plant species. To investigate this, we used microbial communities from the rainfall manipulation LTER at Kellogg Biological Station to inoculate mesocosms simulating early successional grassland communities under drought or …
