natural history — 2016 — The 21st Century Matriarch

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

How Forest Loss is Leading to a Rise in Human Disease – Zika has been in the news lately – but there are other diseases associated with forest loss as well: malaria, dengue fever, Chikungunya, yellow fever, and Ebola. There is building evidence of how and why it happens.

New interactive guide tells the story of forest products in the South – Many years ago, I worked for St. Regis Paper in Texas before they were bought by International Paper – so I read this article with interest to see what has happened to the industry in the past 30 or so year. The guide is located here.

Invasive Plant to Avoid: English Ivy, Barberry, Butterfly Bush, Winter Creeper, Daylilies - I liked these articles because they provided alternative to these invasive species to use in landscaping. I still have daylilies that I’ve had for years but I’m not going to be containing them rather than propagating them!

Spruce Tree House to Remain Closed at Mesa Verde National Park – Sad that this is closed. We probably have some very old slides from our vacation to Mesa Verde in the late 1970s that I should retrieve from storage!

Consumers have huge environmental impact – Thought provoking. The site for the EUs Glamurs project is here.

7 Resources for Natural History Nerds – Don’t let the initial picture stop you from looking at the rest of the article – it is only a lizard. These are impressive resources. I knew about only 2 of them before seeing the article. I’m bookmarking this article.

Getting the Word Out – More scientists are realizing that it is part of their job to get the interesting aspects of their work out to the public as part of modern instantaneous news. The public is demanding timely information on cutting-edge science!

Five Close Encounters of the Crocodilian Kind – The pictures are good….and the crocodilians are from around the world.

Lead, Plumbosolvency, and Phosphates in the Environment – A well written explanation of how water-works can go very wrong.

The Scale of the Universe – I’ve started taking a Big History course on Coursera and this one of the resources in the first week’s module. Scale is always a challenge and this site does a reasonable job in visualize the very small and the very large.

I went to Belmont Manor and Historic Park in Elkridge, MD frequently enough over the past year to observe it in every season. Last summer a large English Elm on the front lawn of the Manor had to be cut down (Dutch Elm Disease). I took this picture shortly before it was cut down - the picture taken from an angle that the dead part of the tree didn’t show too much. A month later the tree was gone, the stump and exposed roots dug out, and new sod put over the wound. A month later and it was hard to tell where the tree had ever been. The episode stirred some thoughts about the natural history of a place and the significance of our actions on that.

The English Elm was planted – a non-native to North America. Whoever made the decision to plant an English Elm may have been wise in the end because this one lasted longer than most of the American Elms against Dutch Elm Disease.

The pond further down the hill was probably dug in the 1980s. It was probably always a wet area. There was probably a vernal pool there in spring. Lots of wood frogs would have successfully laid their eggs there and new frogs would have emerged. Now the pond has fish – that eat frog eggs.

In the 1900s – the area in front of the house was open. For some of those years it was pasture for horses. The forest would have been different. At the beginning of the century there might have been American Chestnuts in the forest. They would have been noticeable for their size and their nuts would have been gathered every fall – by people and squirrels (and other animals too). There is no tree that has quite filled the niche of the American Chestnut that was wiped out by the mid-1900s by the Chestnut Blight.

Earlier in the 1800s, many of the trees would have been cut for fuel. There were a lot of ironworks. There were massive erosion events when the forests were cut and the Patapsco River – downhill to the north of Belmont – received a lot of sediment changing it from a navigable river to a shallow, easily flooding river by the early part of the 1800s.

Prior to anything being built on the hilltop where the Manor House is today – the area was forested. The chestnuts were the big tree and the Europeans were impressed by the richness of the life in the rivers.

There is so much that we did not preserve…and that we still don’t quite know how to sustain.