UW–Madison biochemistry professor John Ralph has been awarded the forestry industry’s top prize, alongside collaborator Wout Boerjan, a professor at Ghent University in Belgium, for their groundbreaking research on the molecular structure of lignin, one of the main components of plant cell walls.
New UW–Madison research helps establish lightning as an environmental driver that may dictate what trees will make up tropical forests in the future.
Monica Turner and her team describe in a new study what happens when areas of Yellowstone National Park — adapted to recurring fires every 100 to 300 years — instead burn twice in fewer than 30 years.
“It’s terrifying in some ways,” says Monica Turner, who has been researching in Yellowstone for decades. “We are not talking many years away. Today’s college students will be mid-career. It feels like the future is coming at us fast.”
“It’s a generally thorny problem and we are often scrambling to react,” says lead principal investigator Monica Turner. “In fact, understanding abrupt change in ecological systems is among the biggest challenges in contemporary ecology.”
Like a casino dealer shuffling the deck, climate change is starting to reorder species from the grasslands of Argentina to ice-free areas of Greenland. New research published Monday (Sept. 19) in the journal Nature Climate Change by researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark and the University of Wisconsin–Madison illuminates where and why novel species combinations …
“It’s not only western forests where these things matter, where disturbances and changing environments shape regional landscapes,” says Wisconsin researcher Monica Turner.
A UW-Madison research group has documented an exodus of owls following the fierce, 99,000 acre King Fire in California in 2014.
It may be music to gardeners’ ears, but that tune could be alarming to some native and migratory birds and bugs.
The new course focuses on science as problem solving, but also fills utterly practical needs.
Researchers say warm, dry conditions in the years following fires impedes the growth and establishment of vulnerable new seedlings.
If you aren’t in Wisconsin to see the colors change, don’t fear. Beginning Sept. 30 through Oct. 28, UW-Madison will launch its second-to-last Massive Open Online Course of the year, “Forests and Humans: From the Midwest to Madagascar.”
In an effort to alleviate the environmental burden of electronic devices, a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers has collaborated with researchers in the Madison-based U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) to develop a surprising solution: a semiconductor chip made almost entirely of wood.
A new study published today [Monday, March 2, 2015] in Nature Plants shows that hungry, plant-eating insects may limit the ability of forests to take up elevated levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, reducing their capacity to slow human-driven climate change.
Stable, frozen ground has long been recognized a logger’s friend, capable of supporting equipment and trucks in marshy or soggy forests. Now, a comprehensive look at weather from 1948 onward shows that the logger’s friend is melting. The study, published in the current issue of the Journal of Environmental Management, finds that the period of frozen ground has declined by an average of two or three weeks since 1948.
Mountain pine beetles get a bad rap, and understandably so. The grain-of-rice-sized insects are responsible for killing pine trees over tens of millions of acres in the Western U.S. and Canada over the last decade. But contrary to popular belief, these pests may not be to blame for more severe wildfires like those that have recently swept through the region. Instead, according to a new study by UW-Madison zoology professor Monica Turner, weather and topography play a greater role in the ecological severity of fires than these bark-boring beetles.
Cleaning up oil spills and metal contaminates in a low-impact, sustainable and inexpensive manner remains a challenge for companies and governments globally. But a group of researchers at UW–Madison is examining alternative materials that can be modified to absorb oil and chemicals.
Field ecologists go to great lengths to get data: radio collars and automatic video cameras are only two of their creative techniques for documenting the natural world. So when a group of ecologists set out to see how wind moves seeds through isolated patches of habitat carved into a longleaf pine plantation in South Carolina, they twisted colored yarn to create mock seeds that would drift with the wind much like native seeds.
Conservationists have long known that lines on a map are not sufficient to protect nature because what happens outside those boundaries can affect what happens within. Now, a study by two University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists in the department of forest and wildlife ecology measures the threat of housing development around protected areas in the United States.