Posts

Reproductive goldilocks: The Florida apple snail reproduction across water depths

By -
Image
Blog by: Nathan Barrus Check out  Contributing Bloggers  for Bio      In the classic children’s story, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Goldilocks walks into a house owned by a family of bears and eats the bears’ porridge, uses the bears’ chairs, and sleeps in the bears’ beds. But when trying out each of the bear’s possessions, the condition of each possession - whether the heat of the porridge, or softness of the chairs and beds – starts at one extreme and goes to the other.   In the end, Goldilocks chooses the intermediate condition that is “just right”.   Historically, the Everglades was a flowing system; water flowed from Lake Okeechobee south to Florida Bay. In the early 1900s, the Everglades were divided and impounded by levees, and then drained by canals to create space for people to live and farm. Impoundments resulted in “ponding” in some areas while drainage reduced water levels and flooding duration in others. Overall, the current Everglades has altered hydrologic conditions
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracking the invisible: carbon dioxide flux in an ecotonal wetland

By -
Image
Blog By: Amanda Richey Check out Contributing Bloggers for Bio The salty is getting saltier . A ll around the world, change s in fresh water flow combined with intruding saltwater is salinizing coastal freshwater and brackish wetlands . Salinization is stressing these transitional habitats , which leads to vegetation loss and with it, the carbon stored in stems, leaves, and root systems. Additionally, l ush, freshwater plant communitie s are being replaced by more salt tolerant species . Th e variation in coastal wetland response to salinization due to water level changes makes the fate of these systems uncertain , as well as the fate of the carbon t hey store. Understanding carbon dynamics in coastal vegetated ecosystems is essential because these ecosystems are globally important carbon sinks, and they are at risk of being lost.     Saltmarsh, mangrove forests, and seagrass meadows are all known as “blue carbon” ecosystems because they are efficient at
Post a Comment
Read more

What Happened to the FIU Nature Preserve?!

By -
Image
Blog By: Grace McLeod Check out Contributing Bloggers for Bio If you’ve taken a walk through the FIU nature preserve recently, you may have noticed, it looks a little different. The core of the preserve is an endangered pine rockland ecosystem. These forests used to cover what is now the Miami urban area. Today, only a few small patches remain, making it one of the most endangered ecosystems in the world. But just protecting these remnant patches from further development isn’t enough; in order to keep them healthy, they need to burn! Pine rocklands are what we call a fire-dependent ecosystem. This means that they depend on regular disturbance by fire to maintain their biodiversity, structure, and ecological function. In the prolonged absence of fire, the upwards of 15 endemic plants found in these forests begin to be outcompeted by less fire-adapted species. In as little as 15-20 years without fire, the forest will transition to an entirely different ecosystem. But as you can imagine,
Post a Comment
Read more

Changing Fires Mean Changing Forests

By -
Image
Blog By: Grace McLeod Check out  Contributing Bloggers  for Bio Figure 1: Early regeneration just two weeks after a wildfire. Photo: Grace McLeod Standing under the towering pines, it's hard to believe there was a wildfire here just a couple weeks ago. The needles of the lower tree branches are scorched brown, and the smell of wet charcoal sits heavy in the humid air after last night's rain, but the black ground is scattered with tufts of bright green grass almost as tall as my ash-scuffed boots. It’s amazing how fast fire-dependent ecosystems start to recover! The pine forests of the southeastern US have evolved with frequent fire (Figure 1). Many of the species of plants and animals depend on the regular disturbance, and without it, the open pine forests, which are highly endangered and host incredible biodiversity, will start to change to denser, more hardwood dominated systems.  I talk to people all the time who have lived in Florida their whole lives and had no idea wild
Post a Comment
Read more

The "Bad Guy" in the Everglades

By Anonymous -
Image
        If you were to name some good things about wetlands, what would you say? Maybe you would mention their role in climate change mitigation -- that they serve as a buffer for sea level rise, and that they have a strong carbon sequestration ability. Or you might talk about their role as habitats for millions of organisms. However, if you needed to name some “bad things” about wetlands… What would you say? Today, let’s get to know the “bad guy” in the Everglades – methane.            Methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas that is more potent than the better-known gas carbon dioxide (CO2), since it has 25-36 times the global warming potential of CO2. In addition, the atmospheric methane concentration has increased 2.6 times from the preindustrial period. Methane is produced in soil with no oxygen conditions, therefore, since wetlands are commonly inundated with water, they are a perfect ecosystem to produce methane since water prevents oxygen from going to the soil. Methane is released in
Post a Comment
Read more

Shocking Fish and Connecting with Nature

By Anonymous -
Image
                 Ever heard of fishing with dynamite? Well, we fish with something that may sound just as crazy but is much less destructive, electricity! Mixing water and electricity sounds like trouble, but it is actually a widely used method to collect and monitor fish communities in freshwater systems around the world. Our boat-mounted electrofishing set up allows the driver to control the output of electrical current to temporarily immobilize the fish and give the netters a chance to scoop them up and place them in a livewell.   Once the transect is completed, each fish is measured, weighted, and released with the exception of non-native species. Our work focuses on how community assemblage and species abundance changes with hydrology at the marsh-mangrove interface of Shark River, or Shark River Estuary (SRE). Shark River Estuary acts as an important dry season refuge for freshwater species driven out of the drying marsh and thus provides foraging opportunities for marine and est
Post a Comment
Read more