“One of the big concerns over the last half century or so is that water quality in the Chesapeake Bay is getting worse,” Parker said.
That problem is exacerbated by nutrient runoff from decades of farming in the mid-Atlantic region.
“What our study is doing is we take those 35 years of pre-data," Parker said. "We put a forest in. Now we can compare what happens when you had corn versus what happens when you have a native forest planted in this diverse arrangement. If we plant even more of that watershed with forest, do we take out even more of those nutrients?”
Changing landscape
Smithsonian Research Fellow Susan Cook-Patton, who helped design BiodiversiTree, gathers leaf samples with intern Emily Dubois.
“We are interested in how the insects are eating the leaves now," Cook-Patton said. "And we are also looking at traits that the leaves have to see if there are some types of species that have things that make the leaves less palatable, like if they are really tough or if they are really fuzzy those types of leaves will get less consumed by insects.”
“If you do not have a baseline, you really do not know what you have lost or gained in the future," she said. "So if you can have a snapshot in time and move forward from there, you can actually learn a lot more than if we keep doing an experiment in two years, in 10 more years in the future we do another one short term experiment. So, scientifically, that's incredible.”
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2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25