Due to a change in our webinar service provider, recordings of past EMG State Office webinars are temporarily unavailable. We expect to restore webinar recordings sometime this Fall. When webinars are again available, we will send out an announcement via the biweekly update. Thank you for your patience during this time.
VMGA Education Day 2018: “Bats, Birds and Bugs: Gardening on the Wilder Side” – Appomattox, VA – September 29, 2018 – Holiday Lake 4-H Center, Speakers on entomology, bats, wildflowers, water resources, and what’s happening in your backyard that you might not be aware of! (Registration Deadline – September 11, 2018)
Cost $40 VMGA members; $50 for others. Lunch included in fee.
Flyers went out to all VMGA members; contact your VMGA representative.
Spark page from Colorado: Check out these resources from the Colorado Master Gardener program, discussing staffing booths at public events!
Whether you attended the 2018 Master Gardener College or not, you should still check out the Brag Boards that were submitted! Click HERE to view the video of all of them! Make sure to send in a brag board next year to brag about your unit!
The English language is replete with idioms about beavers, like “beaver away” or “busy as a beaver,” all signifying hard work and industry. In his new book, Eager, Ben Goldfarb takes us inside the amazing world of nature’s premier construction engineer—which can create dams as long as half a mile—and shows us why the restoration of an animal almost driven to extinction is producing wide-ranging, positive effects on our landscapes, ecology, and even our economy.
When National Geographic caught up with Goldfarb by phone in New York, he explained how beavers are playing a crucial role in the American West, how a beaver named Jose set up home on the previously poisonous Bronx River, and why the only way to tell a beaver’s sex is to sniff its butt.
You call beavers, “ecological and hydrological Swiss army knives” and “one of our most triumphant wildlife success stories.” Elaborate on those two statements, and showcase some of the economic and even medical benefits of beaver restoration.
Classic beaver behavior, which every third grader can identify, is building dams. By doing this, they create ponds and wetlands that turn out to be important for many reasons. The first is biodiversity habitat, providing places to live for fish and wildlife. In the American West, where things are pretty dry, wetlands cover just 2 percent of the total land area, but support about 80 percent of the biodiversity. Any creature capable of creating wetlands becomes immensely important. Imagine being a frog that breeds in a pond, a juvenile salmon that grows up in one, or a duck that nests near one. The number of species that depend on these beaver habitats is virtually limitless.
Beavers provide all kinds of great services for us humans, too. Beaver ponds filter out pollution, store water for use by farms and ranches, slow down floods, and act as firebreaks or reduce erosion. One study in Utah found that restoring beavers to a single river basin produced tens of millions of dollars in economic benefits each year.
In North America, when the first white traders and trappers arrived, there were as many as 400 million beavers. By 1900, there were perhaps 100,000. For three centuries they were trapped for their pelts; their furs made great hats. Then, in the early 1900s, we woke up and realized that incessantly trapping these animals was not sustainable and that these were important creatures, which we needed back in our landscapes. The recovery of beavers proves that conservation works!
One of the most ambitious beaver restoration projects is taking place in the Methow Valley, Washington State. Describe what they are attempting.
The Methow Valley is in central Washington on the east side of the Cascade Range. It’s a pretty dry place, with lots of wildfires. Snowpack and glacial melt from the Cascades is also declining, so water is critical. It’s one of the country’s largest apple- and hop-growing regions, a critical agricultural bread basket in the middle of Washington State. Inevitably, there are lots of beaver conflicts. Usually, the knee jerk reaction is to trap them out. But the Methow Project traps the beavers and relocates them to headwater streams on public lands high up in the mountains, thus getting them off private land. By building dams and creating ponds, they keep rivers and streams in Central Washington wet throughout the entire year. So beavers function as a climate adaptation strategy, compensating for the loss of snowpack and glacial melt.
On the Puget Sound, beavers are also being re-introduced to enhance salmon stocks. How does this work?
That’s a cool project! If you’re a baby salmon, you don’t want to live in the main channel; you’re going to get blown downriver. You’re looking for some nice, slow water habitat, like a pool or backwater, where you can get out of the current and find food without using too much energy. By slowing waters down, beavers create that fantastic salmon habitat.
This is important for Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest, who have historically been dependent on salmon. Salmon runs all over America have declined as a result of dams, overfishing and habitat loss. By reintroducing beavers to recreate salmon habitat, tribes like the Tulalip can restore some of the fish they depend on and that are integral to their culture.
You did some pretty messy hands-on research for your book. Tell us about your experiences “sniffing beaver butts.”
[Laughs] In the Methow Beaver Project they like to find compatible pairs of beavers to relocate as a family. That way, they will settle down and start building dams like you want them to. Oftentimes, if you catch a beaver by itself, that beaver is going to go wandering around looking for a mate and probably get eaten by a bear or a cougar. The Methow Project tries to create compatible beaver pairs, a bit like a beaver dating service. [laughs]
But beavers make it difficult to differentiate the sexes. Male beavers don’t have external genitalia, which makes sense. If you’re an animal that spends its life swimming around logjams, you don’t want any dangling bits that can get snagged. [laughs] And, unless the female is lactating, you can’t reliably tell which sex she is.
The only way to differentiate the sexes is to use your fingers to push out the anal gland on the beaver’s underside, squeeze out a little dollop of the secretion they use to mark their territory, and sniff it. If it smells like motor oil it’s a male, and if it smells like cheese it’s female. [laughs] I got to smell two beavers but I could not reliably tell them apart. The folks at the Methow Project absolutely can, though. And they use this method to make compatible beaver matches.
You meet a colorful cast of characters along the way. Tell us about Heidi Perryman and her organization Worth A Dam.
Heidi is a fascinating person, a child psychologist who didn’t know much about beavers until 2007, when beavers showed up in downtown Martinez, California, where she lives. It’s in the Bay Area, the former home of John Muir, and when beavers showed up there the response of the city was to kill them because landowners downtown were worried they were going to cause flood damages. There’s no evidence supporting this, but the reflexive reaction was to get rid of them.
Heidi spent a lot of time going to the streams of Alhambra Creek, where the beavers lived. She filmed them and organized a campaign to save them. In so doing, she became one of the most knowledgeable beaver advocates in the country. She now organizes an annual beaver festival in downtown Martinez. As a result of her campaigning, the city has let beavers live with many generations of offspring and now Martinez is regarded as a leader in beaver coexistence.
A lot of the foremost beaver authorities are self-taught people, like Heidi. I met former real estate agents and physicians working on beaver issues—all kinds of people who aren’t trained biologists, but come into contact with these amazing animals and get transfixed. There’s a group called The Beaver Believers, an informal designation that beaver-lovers give themselves. You don’t have to be a wildlife biologist to be a beaver believer. You just have to be a person who spends time with these animals and experiences their power to transform landscapes.
Another charismatic character is Dave Rosgen, aka The Restoration Cowboy. Introduce us to him and his work.
He’s probably the most famous stream restoration practitioner in the country. He wears this big hat and belt buckle and is this swaggering guy who leads workshops around the country attended by thousands of restoration professionals. In some quarters he is a controversial figure, though, because he sometimes uses heavy-handed methods, like bulldozers, to recontour streams.
Everybody in the stream restoration community respects what he’s done, but there are some stream restoration practitioners who think of beavers as an alternative to Rosgen’s techniques. Instead of using heavy machinery, you can put in lighter, much cheaper artificial beaver dams by pounding a few logs into a stream, which induces the beavers to come and take over. Rosgen is also a beaver fan and in his own way imitates them through the use of heavy machinery. There’s this continuum of approaches when it comes to stream restoration, but beavers are increasingly at the forefront of restoring degraded streams in the American West.
Britain is also experimenting with beaver restoration. Tell us about your journey to the Highlands and the Scottish Beaver Trial.
Beavers were completely wiped out in Britain by the late 1700s. But in the last few years there have been a number of reintroduction efforts, taking beavers from Germany and Norway and relocating them to England and Scotland. Some of these efforts, like the Scottish Beaver Trial, are officially authorized by the government. Some are a little more rogue.
I went to England in the course of my reporting and saw both the official releases, as well as the unofficial reintroductions, and the picture is really bright! In Scotland, there’s still a fair amount of beaver resistance among farmers, but the Scottish government has acknowledged that they are a native species and is moving to protect them and they are gradually becoming a more integral part of the landscape again.
That’s important in Britain because it’s a rainy place with lots of flooding issues. There is some great research on reintroduced beaver colonies in Devon, southwest England, showing that their ponds and wetlands are fantastic when it comes to mitigating flood damage. As floods race downstream, the water gets stored in the ponds and disbursed outward to the surrounding wetlands. This research team from Exeter, in Devon, has shown that beavers swallow up 30 percent of the water during your typical big rain event. So, a lot of beaver reintroductions in the U.K. now are motivated by flood damage reduction, which is another cool function of beavers.
Bring it home for us, Ben, by summing up what you love about beavers, and what you think the future holds for them.
One of the things I love about them is that they’re so easy to empathize with. We humans love rearranging our surroundings to maximize our own human shelter and beavers do the exact same thing! They’re incredibly ingenious and enterprising. I find that so relatable.
As to what the future holds, it’s in many respects very bright. I grew up just upriver from New York City, which was once an incredible beaver habitat. Even Times Square used to be this beaver-filled swamp. But by the early 1900s beavers had been completely wiped out by trappers, pollution, and development. Then, in 2006, a beaver returned to the Bronx River, which had been incapable of supporting any life. It was named Jose, in honor of Congressman Jose Serrano, the local politician who catalyzed the restoration of the Bronx River. Since then, beavers have been coming down to the Bronx and that’s a hopeful thing for a lot of people. It shows that we’re capable of remedying some of our most serious environmental mistakes.
On my travels, I saw beavers in wilderness areas, like Yellowstone. But I also saw lots of beavers in places like downtown Martinez, California. I even visited a colony of beavers next to a Wal-Mart parking lot in Utah! [laughs] These are animals that do pretty well in close proximity to humans, and if we let them they can provide many wonderful services. As one beaver scientist put it: “We have to let beavers do their work, to help us solve some of our most serious environmental problems.”
Songbirds and coffee farms in Central America. Ladybugs and soybean fields in the Midwest.
These are well-known, win-win stories that demonstrate how conserving natural habitat can benefit farmers.
But an international team of authors, including Megan O’Rourke, assistant professor in the Virginia Tech School of Plant and Environmental Sciences, found that natural habitat surrounding farm fields is not always an effective pest-control tool for farmers worldwide. The team’s analysis was published Aug. 2 in the journal PNAS.
“For the last 20 years, many scientists have suggested that you will have fewer insect pests on your farm if the farm is surrounded by natural habitats, such as forests,” said O’Rourke.
To test that assumption, lead authors Daniel Karp, an assistant professor in the UC Davis Department of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology, and Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer, of the Natural Capital Project at Stanford University, organized an international team of ecologists, economists, and practitioners at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center. Together, they compiled the largest pest-control dataset of its kind, encompassing 132 studies from more than 6,700 sites in 31 countries worldwide — from California farmlands to tropical cacao plantations and European wheat fields.
Surprisingly, the results were highly variable across the globe. While many of the studies showed surrounding natural habitat does indeed help farmers control pests, just as many showed negative effects on crop yields. The analysis indicates that there are no one-size-fits-all recommendations for growers about natural habitat and pests.
“Natural habitats support many services that can help farmers and society, such as pollination and wildlife conservation, but we want to be clear about when farmers should or should not expect the land around their farms to affect pest management,” said O’Rourke, who works within the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the Fralin Life Science Institute. “Diverse landscapes are not a silver bullet for pest control but should be considered as part of a holistic and sustainable pest management plan.”
Critically, Karp and his team of 153 co-authors have made their pest-control database publicly available, opening the door for further scientific insights. Karp hopes the database will grow over time and help inform predictive models about when surrounding habitat helps control pests and when it does not.
Imagine this: you are a new assistant professor in biological sciences at Virginia Tech. You are overwhelmed by setting up your lab, hiring staff, writing grant proposals, submitting manuscripts, and recruiting graduate students. What is your most precious resource? Time.
This is where the Virginia Tech Faculty Activity Support Team, or VT-FAST, comes in.
VT-FAST is a virtual team of faculty and staff across campus who support faculty at Virginia Tech in all aspects of grant and proposal development. Their goal is to facilitate proposal preparation, formatting, and editing, thereby allowing faculty to focus more directly on their research plan.
VT-FAST support ranges from single-investigator proposals to larger, more complex proposals involving teams with external partners. The concept is for VT-FAST to provide all Virginia Tech faculty timely access to personnel that can help with a variety of tasks. As examples, VT-FAST can help with grant writing and manuscript preparation, as well as providing a mechanism to help faculty interface with compliance personnel and the Office of Sponsored Programs. It can also help faculty locate information about existing equipment resources. You can look at the VT-FAST website to see how the team can help you in your next proposal submission.
Dennis Dean, director of the Fralin Life Science Institute, said, “this type of assistance will be particularly useful to new faculty members. The goal of VT-FAST is to contribute to coordination among the institutes and to help with development of large, complex, multidisciplinary grant applications. Over the years, we have provided such services, but I believe now is the time to better coordinate university assets located within institutes, departments, and colleges in a way that can be leveraged to assist faculty more effectively on a larger scale.”
Janet Webster, associate director of finance and administration at the Fralin Life Science Institute, and Jon Greene, associate director for strategic development, Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science, or ICTAS, will be leading VT-FAST.
“The whole idea of VT-FAST is to help Virginia Tech faculty succeed. That could mean one of us helping a junior faculty write a better single-PI proposal. And it could also mean convening a team from across the university to support one of our top researchers to best position the university and write a winning proposal for a big federal grant. And then, after we win, help manage the resulting research program,” said Greene.
Janet Webster, associate director of finance and administration at the Fralin Life Science Institute, reviews a grant with biological sciences associate professor Carla Finkielstein.
“Large, collaborative grants have a ripple effect on research that goes beyond the funding itself — they jump-start research partnerships and tend to generate additional ideas. Connecting faculty with the resources to put together competitive applications for those grants is one of the ways we fulfill our role of advancing the university by growing externally funded research,” said Stefan Duma, director of ICTAS.
Webster has worked with Fralin faculty affiliate Carla Finkielstein on several successful grant proposals and manuscripts. Finkelstein, an associate professor of biological sciences in the College of Science, researches the molecular basis by which environmental factors influence sporadic breast cancer incidence with a focus in circadian disruption as toxic agent. She also seeks to understand the mechanisms by which tumors develop resistance to conventional therapies and interfere with those processes using nano-based technologies.
“Science is all about generating innovative ideas and being able to communicate them effectively, to both the general public and our colleagues. When it comes to writing, I count on VT-FAST’s expertise for feedback to ensure that the excitement I put into my science translates into my grant proposal,” said Finkielstein.
Webster is also working with Jessica Crawford, the grants and contracts officer for the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, and Nancy Dudek, the grants coordinator for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, to coordinate a large National Institutes of Health grant for Kiho Lee, an assistant professor of animal and poultry sciences.
Lee’s research focuses on early embryonic development in pigs. Major research topics in his laboratory include identifying the mechanism of epigenetic reprogramming by oocytes after fertilization and developing an efficient approach to produce genetically engineered pig models for agriculture and biomedical research.
“When I began this job five years ago, there weren’t enough professionals on campus to break down a large NIH submission into small, feasible tasks. Back then, the PI and I did it all ourselves,” said Dudek. “Now with VT-FAST, I have colleagues like Jessica Crawford and Janet Webster who are willing to break off and support pieces of the proposal so we can each create higher quality documents. When we merge our pieces together, we have a much more polished grant proposal (and less stress). It reminds me of the motto on the U.S. seal, E Pluribus Unum, or, ‘out of many, one.’ ”
VT-FAST also wants to underscore that support is not limited to just science and engineering faculty. They will support faculty from all colleges and departments on campus.
The Institute for Society, Culture, and Environment, or ISCE, is also excited to get involved.
“ISCE is delighted the VT-FAST group has come together to share grant-related resources and expertise with one another and with Virginia Tech faculty,” said Karen Roberto, director of the Institute for Society, Culture, and Environment and University Distinguished Professor. “While ISCE has always offered assistance to the faculty associated with the institute, we are excited that our staff can now draw upon the wider resources of VT-FAST to enhance the support we provide.”
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Elizabeth Boineau’s 1939 Colonial sits a block and a half from the Ashley River in a sought-after neighborhood of ancient live oaks, charming gardens and historic homes. A year ago, she thought she could sell it for nearly $1 million. But after dropping the price 11 times, Boineau has decided to tear it down.
In March, the city’s Board of Architectural Review approved the demolition — a decision not taken lightly in Charleston’s historic district.
“Each time that I was just finishing up paying off the bills, another flood would hit,” Boineau said.
Boineau is one of many homeowners on the front lines of society’s confrontation with climate change, living in houses where rising sea levels have worsened flooding not just in extreme events like hurricanes, but also heavy rains and even high tides. Now, three studies have found evidence that the threat of higher seas is also undermining coastal property values as home buyers — particularly investors — begin the retreat to higher ground.
On a broad scale, the effect is subtle, the studies show. The sea has risen about eight inches since 1900, and the pace is accelerating, with three inches accumulating since 1993, according to a comprehensive federal climate report released last year. Scientists predict the oceans will rise an additional three to seven inches by 2030, and as much as 4.3 feet by 2100.
Meanwhile, mapping has become increasingly precise, providing near-exact elevations that let researchers predict when individual properties could be underwater.
By comparing properties that are virtually the same but for their exposure to the seas, researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Pennsylvania State University found that vulnerable homes sold for 6.6 percent less than unexposed homes. The most vulnerable properties — those that stand to be flooded after seas rise by just one foot — were selling at a 14.7 percent discount, according to the study, which is set to be published in the Journal of Financial Economics.
The study found the drop in prices appears to be driven primarily by investors buying multiple properties or second homes. Such buyers tend to be wealthier and better educated than owners who occupy their coastal homes, said Ryan Lewis, an assistant professor of finance at the University of Colorado and a co-author of the study.
“Sophisticated buyers . . . demand a discount to bear the risk of future sea level rise,” Lewis said in an email.
The most-studied market has been Miami-Dade County, parts of which have for years been experiencing regular sunny-day flooding. In a separate paper published in April, researchers at Harvard University found that properties at higher elevations were appreciating faster than properties at lower elevations, a phenomenon they dubbed “climate gentrification.”
Last month, the nonprofit First Street Foundation released the first analysis to single out Charleston, a gracious port city founded in 1670. The analysis suggests that exposed homes in Charleston have lost $266 million in value since 2005 because of coastal flooding and expectations of still higher seas. (Using the same method, the First Street researchers found a $465 million loss in Miami-Dade County.)
Elizabeth Boineau decided to demolish her home in Charleston, S.C., shown above, and sell the lot after the two-story Colonial was damaged by flooding. (Hunter McRae for The Washington Post)
Harvard’s Jesse Keenan, who worked on the climate gentrification study, said the research is “an emerging area” that has produced uneven results. For instance, the Colorado-Penn State study found lower property values along the U.S. coast as a whole and in several states, including New York, New Jersey, Florida and Massachusetts. But it did not detect a change in South Carolina.
In addition, the overall effect on prices appears to be surprisingly small, said Susan Wachter, a professor of real estate at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
“You could turn it around, almost,” Wachter said. “Despite all the discussion of sea level rise, and despite the tremendous increase in the number of events over the last years and the destructiveness of the events, coastal building continues and coastal property appreciation continues.”
Indeed, beachfront property is not necessarily declining in value. Rather, the studies suggest that more-exposed properties — including properties that have not yet experienced direct flooding — simply are not appreciating as rapidly as their inland neighbors.
Home prices on the coast are “going up along with market trends. They’re just not going up as fast as other places,” said Jeremy Porter, a Columbia University researcher who conducted the First Street study with Steven McAlpine, the group’s head of data science.
Charleston, for example, has a hot real estate market characterized by high demand even though the city’s historic heart sits at low elevation, is surrounded on three sides by water and has recorded a rise in sea level of roughly a foot over the past century.
A large part of that rise has come in the last 25 years, said Norm Levine, director of the Lowcountry Hazards Center at the College of Charleston. As a result, roughly 1 percent of buildings in the Charleston area are now seeing annual flooding, Levine said. “Our 50-year estimate is that it will be 15 percent of the inventory of buildings.”
While homes that have already flooded are clearly losing value, Levine said he is skeptical of the First Street study’s findings that other properties in Charleston are also being affected. That there will be an effect on real estate at some point is “a given,” Levine said. “The question is how long before it actually starts happening.”
Owen Tyler, the managing broker of the Cassina Group, a realty company that sells million-dollar-plus historic homes in Charleston, agrees. Home buyers are asking increasingly savvy questions about flooding, Tyler said, “a dramatic change from three years ago or five years ago.”
But Tyler said it’s mainly homes that have already flooded that are suffering; he said he has seen no “big change” in the market overall.
“Some of the houses that had water in them last year, they’re selling a little slower. They’re staying on the market a longer time,” said Judy Tarleton, the broker in charge at Carriage Properties, another local realty company. “But we are still seeing lots of people come to Charleston.”
Boineau lives in Harleston Village, one of the neighborhoods that has been hardest hit. In October 2015, flooding on the Ashley River damaged gardens and homes after an extreme rain event dropped about 20 inches on the city. Not a month later, an 8.7-foot tide flooded the neighborhood again.
In 2016, Hurricane Matthew drove a six-foot storm surge into the city. And in 2017, the remnants of Hurricane Irma again flooded some Harleston Village homes, including Boineau’s.
“I definitely feel like something has changed,” Boineau said when asked about sea level rise and whether flooding in Charleston is getting worse. “And I think that we all have a lot to be concerned about.”
“There was no discussion of flooding when we moved into this house in 2004,” said Susan Lyons, 75, a retired journalist who lives two blocks from the river and has had to file insurance claims three times to replace flood-damaged ducts. “We’ve all been blown away by the amount of water that comes from the river.”
Boineau put her house on the market last August priced just shy of $1 million, after repairs from two straight years of flooding that had come up under the house but left the interior largely unaffected. Then in September, the remnants of Hurricane Irma inundated the first floor of the house with eight inches of water.
Even when a property has flooded, local real estate agents said homeowners can reassure buyers by waterproofing electrical systems, moving ductwork and, at the extreme, elevating the entire house — a pricey endeavor.
Boineau made ductwork and other repairs after the first two flooding events, but after the third, she dropped the price to $599,900 and went through a lengthy process to get permission for demolition.
Now, Boineau says, a new buyer can build an elevated property on the lot. When that’s done, her real estate agent, Robin Reeves, said the property should “go for 1.3 to 1.4 million dollars.”
Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg (I) — himself a former real estate agent — said the city is looking for other ways to protect property values. Officials are considering a “comprehensive set of flooding and sea-level-rise strategies,” including improving pumping systems and raising Charleston’s Battery, a sea wall at the tip of the peninsula.
But those are expensive and complex solutions, Tecklenburg said; even if Charleston had the money, designs are not even in place yet for all of the potential engineering projects.
“Our flooding challenges have been around for hundreds of years, because we filled creeks and marshland, before people figured out that wasn’t a particularly wise thing to do,” Tecklenburg said. “So we’re playing catch-up, no doubt about it, and it will take a little time.”
As city officials adjust, so do Charleston residents. Unable to find a buyer willing to purchase and then repair the home, Boineau decided to demolish it and sell the lot in Harleston Village. She is renting a condo just across the river from the city’s central peninsula in West Ashley, where her new neighbors have assured her there has been no flooding. She hopes to buy there after the Harleston lot sells.
“Charleston,” she said, “is still an incredible place to live.”
The kudzu of the tree world could one day be controlled by a fungus.
Virginia Tech graduate student Rachel Brooks is testing how the fungus verticillium attacks tree of heaven, an invasive species for which Brooks used the kudzu reference. The hope: that the fungus will help kill the tree, which grows just about everywhere.
Tree of heaven is a plant from China that creates problems across Virginia and the country. The tree spreads and grows rapidly, growing as much as five to ten feet a year. It often chokes out native plants, blocks drivers’ views on roadways and grows in agricultural or urban areas. There is also some evidence that the tree is a preferred breeding spot for the invasive spotted lanternfly, which could wreak havoc on Virginia crops.
The plant is prevalent at the Shenandoah Valley Agricultural Research and Extension Center, where Brooks is studying it along with several other sites across the state.
Tree of heaven is an invasive species that is difficult and costly to remove. Virginia Tech doctoral student Rachel Brooks is testing a method to remove the plant using verticillium, a naturally occurring fungus. Here she slices open the troublesome tree’s bark. Photo credit: Matt Gentry, The Roanoke Times
She’s inoculated a few of the trees with verticillium fungus. In a little more than a year, the fungus has killed the trees that were exposed. It’s also spread the fungus through the interwoven tree of heaven root systems to kill off many of the trees in the area.
Brooks keeps coming back to measure the fungal effects.
“The end goal is a product that you can buy in the store,” Brooks said.
It will probably take two or more years of testing and navigating a series of regulations before that will happen, she said. A company would also have to find a way to commercialize the biocontrol.
Currently, if landowners or government agencies want to control the tree they use herbicides. That’s only a short term solution that often only kills one tree.
At a plot at the extension center here in Raphine, located in northern Rockbridge County, Brooks recently infected a few trees and the fungal infection spread to surrounding trees of heaven. A control stand of trees of heaven is unharmed less than a mile away.
Other vegetation didn’t appear to be affected, which backs up a study conducted by a team of Pennsylvania researchers, she said.
That makes sense. Verticillium fungus has been discovered around North America and has even naturally killed off trees of heaven in the New River Valley, Brooks said.
The fungus is not expected to eradicate the tree from the continent. But it will help landowners and other people keep the rapidly growing, invasive tree in check. That can pave the way for plants to grow a little more naturally, Brooks said.
“We want our native trees to have a place to grow,” she said.
As sea levels rise due to climate change, so do the global hazards and potential devastating damages from tsunamis, according to a new study by a partnership that included Virginia Tech.
Even minor sea-level rise, by as much as a foot, poses greater risks of tsunamis for coastal communities worldwide.
The threat of rising sea levels to coastal cities and communities throughout the world is well known, but new findings show the likely increase of flooding farther inland from tsunamis following earthquakes. Think of the tsunami that devasted a portion of northern Japan after the 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake, causing a nuclear plant to melt down and spread radioactive contamination.
These findings are at the center of a new Science Advances study, headed by a multi-university team of scientists from the Earth Observatory of Singapore, the Asian School of the Environment at Nanyang Technological University, and National Taiwan University, with critical support from Virginia Tech’s Robert Weiss, an associate professor in the Department of Geosciences, part of the College of Science.
“Our research shows that sea-level rise can significantly increase the tsunami hazard, which means that smaller tsunamis in the future can have the same adverse impacts as big tsunamis would today,” Weiss said, adding that smaller tsunamis generated by earthquakes with smaller magnitudes occur frequently and regularly around the world. For the study, Weiss was critical in helping create computational models and data analytics frameworks.
At Virginia Tech, Weiss serves as director of the National Science Foundation-funded Disaster Resilience and Risk Management graduate education program and is co-lead of Coastal@VT, composed of 45 Virginia Tech faculty from 13 departments focusing on contemporary and emerging coastal zone issues, such as disaster resilience, migration, sensitive ecosystems, hazard assessment, and natural infrastructure.
For the study, Weiss and his partners, including Lin Lin Li, a senior research fellow, and Adam Switzer, an associate professor, at the Earth Observatory of Singapore, created computer-simulated tsunamis at current sea level and with sea-level increases of 1.5 feet and 3 feet in the Chinese territory of Macau. Macau is a densely populated coastal region located in South China that is generally safe from current tsunami risks.
At current sea level, an earthquake would need to tip past a magnitude of 8.8 to cause widespread tsunami inundation in Macau. But with the simulated sea-level rises, the results surprised the team.
[/vc_column_text][vc_video link=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LtNu8aKxBY” align=”center”][vc_column_text]The sea-level rise dramatically increased the frequency of tsunami-induced flooding by 1.2 to 2.4 times for the 1.5-foot increase and from 1.5 to 4.7 times for the 3-foot increase. “We found that the increased inundation frequency was contributed by earthquakes of smaller magnitudes, which posed no threat at current sea level, but could cause significant inundation at higher sea-level conditions,” Li said.
In the simulated study of Macau – population 613,000 – Switzer said, “We produced a series of tsunami inundation maps for Macau using more than 5,000 tsunami simulations generated from synthetic earthquakes prepared for the Manila Trench.” It is estimated that sea levels in the Macau region will increase by 1.5 feet by 2060 and 3 feet by 2100, according to the team of U.S.-Chinese scientists.
The hazard of large tsunamis in the South China Sea region primarily comes from the Manila Trench, a megathrust system that stretches from offshore Luzon in the Philippines to southern Taiwan. The Manila Trench megathrust has not experienced an earthquake larger than a magnitude 7.8 since the 1560s. Yet, study co-author Wang Yu, from the National Taiwan University, cautioned that the region shares many of the characteristics of the source areas that resulted in the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake, as well as the 2011 earthquake in northern Japan, both causing massive loss of life.
These increased dangers from tsunamis build on already known difficulties facing coastal communities worldwide: The gradual loss of land directly near coasts and increased chances of flooding even during high tides, as sea levels increase as the Earth warms.
“The South China Sea is an excellent starting point for such a study because it is an ocean with rapid sea-level rise and also the location of many mega cities with significant worldwide consequences if impacted. The study is the first if its kind on the level of detail, and many will follow our example,” Weiss said.
Policymakers, town planners, emergency services, and insurance firms must work together to create or insure safer coastlines, Weiss added. “Sea-level rise needs to be taken into account for planning purposes, for example for reclamation efforts but also for designing protective measures, such as seawalls or green infrastructure.”
He added, “What we assumed to be the absolute worst case a few years ago now appears to be modest for what is predicted in some locations. We need to study local sea-level change more comprehensively in order to create better predictive models that help to make investments in infrastructure that are or near sustainable.”
This story was co-authored by Adam Switzer and Shireen Federico of the Earth Observatory of Singapore in China.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row]
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]August 9th, 2018 was a big day last week for both the Interfaces of Global Change IGEP and the Biology Department at Virginia Tech, as two IGC fellows successfully defended their PhD dissertations with flying colors! Congratulations to both Dr. Tamara Fetters and Dr. Carl Wepking! The Global Change Center community is so proud of all you have accomplished and excited for the endeavors that you will take on next.[/vc_column_text][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”42820″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]Tamara presented her dissertation seminar on Thursday morning in Derring Hall, titled “Phenotypic responses to invasion in the brown anole (Anoles sagrei)”. Her research over the past five years took her to the Bahama Islands, part of the brown anole’s native habitat, and the Southeast US, where the anole’s inhabitance is invasive.
Tamara’s work addressed two questions to broaden the scope of knowledge within the evolutionary biology field:
1. How fast can evolution occur in nature?
2. Can we predict evolutionary patterns?[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”42486″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]Carl presented his dissertation seminar on Thursday afternoon, titled “Antibiotics administered to cattle affect terrestrial ecosystem processes via manure inputs”. Carl’s research focused on the effects of antibiotics on the environment – specifically, the effects on soils and how antibiotics can influence microbes, which can therefore effect the greater cycling of important nutrients like carbon and nitrogen. Study sites included Virginia Tech’s Kentland Farm in Blacksburg, in addition to coordinating with several cattle farms across the U.S. in order to publish a nationwide study on soil from areas with large cattle presence versus those with none.
Carl will be taking on the role of Executive Director of the Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative within the School of Environmental Sustainability at Colorado State University.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_column_text]Photos from both Tamara’s and Carl’s defense seminars are archived on the GCC Flickr site.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row]
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently released a report showing that diseases from vectors, such as mosquitoes, ticks, and fleas, have tripled since 2004 in the U.S.
The World Health Organization is also tracking the global spread and increase of vector-borne diseases. Clearly, there is a need for researchers to connect and develop tools to address this problem.
Leah R. Johnson, a Virginia Tech researcher, in collaboration with colleagues at Imperial College London, Stanford, and Penn State, created the Vector Behavior in Transmission Ecology Research Coordination Network, or VectorBiTE RCN, to bring together scientists studying vector-borne infections with diverse perspectives from all over the globe. The VectorBiTE network encourages the collection and consolidation of key data and the development of analytical tools to better understand the impact of behavior of vectors, such as mosquitoes and ticks, on disease transmission.
“We are bringing together specialists in vector behavioral ecology, epidemiology, theoretical ecology, mathematics, and statistics to promote an open exchange of ideas, data, and tools to tackle this problem,” said Johnson, an assistant professor of statistics in the College of Science at Virginia Tech. Johnson’s interests are in statistical and mathematical biology, ecology, and epidemiology, and she is an affiliate of computational modeling and data analytics, the Department of Biological Sciences, and the Global Change Center, housed in the Fralin Life Science Institute.
VectorBiTE RCN is a collaboration created in 2015 and led by Leah Johnson and Lauren Cator, a behavioral ecologist at Imperial College London. The RCN is jointly funded by a National Institutes of Health grant in the United States and a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Resource Council grant in the United Kingdom. The leadership team also includes Samraat Pawar, a senior lecturer at Imperial College London; Erin Mordecai, an assistant professor in biology at Stanford University; and Peter Hudson, an ecologist and biologist at Penn State University.
One of the goals of the VectorBiTE network is to train young researchers to apply these new tools and models as they are developed. Fadoua El Moustaid and Zach Gajewski, two graduate students in the Department of Biological Sciences and Interfaces of Global Change Fellows in Johnson’s lab, are helping to facilitate this training by organizing annual meetings, maintaining the VectorBiTE website, keeping members updated through social media, and participating in working groups and virtual meetings throughout the year.
To this end, the third annual VectorBiTE meeting wrapped up a week of training and working group meetings at the Asilomar Conference Center near Monterey, California, in June. This year’s meeting was split into two parts: a three-day training session for post-docs and graduate students on mathematical and statistical methods as well as an introduction to the Vectorbyte Population Dynamics database, followed by two days of working group meetings.
“We brought in graduate students and post-docs from all over the world. We had students from Australia, Africa, the U.S., and the U.K. participate in the training, and VectorBiTE RCN provided the funding for these individuals to participate,” said El Moustaid, who taught a workshop on statistical modeling.
Graduate student and post-doc participants of the 2018 VectorBiTE meeting’s training session on quantitative tools for vector borne diseases.
Training covered an introduction to data management, visualization, and fitting models to data. It then focused on specific topics in using data on traits of insect vectors to fit mechanistic and statistical trait models and to fit population dynamics models to data taken from Vectorbyte’s VecDyn database.
Working group topics included modeling how life history trade-offs in vector traits may impact transmission of vector-borne disease, creating a framework for understanding how behavioral manipulation of vectors may similarly impact transmission, discussion of tick questing behavior, and individual-based models for vector populations.
“What’s impressed me the most is how VectorBiTE has brought empiricists and theoretical researchers together. They think in such different ways, so an exchange of ideas is powerful. In the past, however, there hasn’t been enough communication between these different groups,” said Gajewski.
The goal of the VectorBiTE RCN is to create this collaborative network of researchers to address and tackle the spread of vector-borne diseases. Through this network, some working groups have already published papers, researchers are collaborating on new projects, and students have found graduate student and post-doctoral positions. Researchers can get involved in the VectorBiTE RCN by applying through the VectorBiTE website.
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] August 9, 2018 Postcard from Nicole Ward
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Hi! I am writing from Sunapee Harbor on Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire, USA. My field season is wrapping up now, but I’ve been here for three months!
My research is aiming to improve water quality monitoring to ensure local residents have good drinking water and recreational water value into the future. A major issue today is that most water quality monitoring protocols only collect water quality samples in one location of a lake, often near the middle or deepest location in a lake. Often, changes in water quality occur over many decades, which means that when even a small change is detected in the middle of a lake, it is likely too late to avoid a drastic decrease in water quality. My goal is to understand how targeted monitoring in different locations of a lake may indicate impending water quality changes earlier than classic monitoring protocols.[/vc_column_text][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]I have been collecting water quality samples in the lake and in the streams that flow into the lake, and have deployed water quality sensors in 4 locations in the lake and automated water samplers in the two largest inflow streams. By linking in-lake water quality measurements with stream measurements, we may be able to target water quality management to specific locations in the watershed that will be the most effective for achieving overall water quality goals for years and decades to come.[/vc_column_text][vc_single_image image=”24674″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”24679″ img_size=”400×550″ add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_column_text]In several of these photos, you can see some of the buoys in the background or featured in the photo—we have two orange, one black, and the LSPA (Lake Sunapee Protective Association) has a large yellow buoy. All of the buoys have chains hanging in the water with various water quality sensors attached, including dissolved oxygen, temperature, and light sensors. There is also a photo of one of the automated water samplers in a large plywood box near one of the streams. I also included a picture of two loons! There are a number of loons on the lake, and it was quite fun to hear them calling all summer long. The coolest is being able to see them swimming/hunting underwater, which is only possible because the water is so clear![/vc_column_text][vc_gallery type=”image_grid” images=”24676,24681,24675,24687″ img_size=”300×300″][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner][vc_column_text]Additionally, I have been working to integrate my research with local community needs. I am working with the Lake Sunapee Protective Association (LSPA; http://www.lakesunapee.org), which is a local non-profit devoted to maintaining the environmental integrity of the watershed through education, outreach, and research. They support citizen science in the watershed and maintain a water quality buoy as a part of the Global Lakes Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON; http://gleon.org). The LSPA is currently writing a watershed management plan, and my work will help inform the implementation of the management plan.[/vc_column_text][vc_single_image image=”24680″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_column_text]My research is part of a larger interdisciplinary and multi-institutional project, the CNH-Lakes project (https://www.cnhlakes.frec.vt.edu). As a group of ~20 researchers representing the disciplines of economics, hydrology, agronomy, limnology, and social science, we are working to understand both how humans influence water quality and how changes in water quality may alter human decision-making. By examining this two-way relationship between people and water, our major goal is to better understand how to achieve water quality goals while avoiding the unintended consequences that often plague environmental decision-making.
This field study was funded by the College of Science Roundtable Scholarship and the Lake Sunapee Protective Association. Thank you so much to logistical, field, and lab support from the LSPA, the Kathy Cottingham lab at Dartmouth (especially post-doc Jennie Brentrup!), Kathie Weathers at the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies, and Lake Sunapee residents Midge and Tim Eliassen.[/vc_column_text][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”24678″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”24677″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_gmaps link=”#E-8_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” title=”Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row]
When National Geographic caught up with Goldfarb by phone in New York, he explained how beavers are playing a crucial role in the American West, how a beaver named Jose set up home on the 
VectorBiTE RCN is a collaboration created in 2015 and led by Leah Johnson and Lauren Cator, a behavioral ecologist at Imperial College London. The RCN is jointly funded by a National Institutes of Health grant in the United States and a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Resource Council grant in the United Kingdom. The leadership team also includes Samraat Pawar, a senior lecturer at Imperial College London; Erin Mordecai, an assistant professor in biology at Stanford University; and Peter Hudson, an ecologist and biologist at Penn State University.