Faculty note: NAS professors Howe and Wolf noted for prestigious publications

NAS professors Bob Howe and Amy Wolf have published two papers with colleagues from the Smithsonian Institution’s Forest Global Earth Observatory (ForestGEO) network, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The first paper, published in the journal Global Change Biology, describes the use of satellite imagery to identify types of ecologically important mycorrhizae (symbiotic fungi associated with tree roots) in forests of eastern North America. The article, entitled “Tree-mycorrhizal associations detected remotely from canopy spectral properties” is the subject of a recent news release by NASA:  http://climate.nasa.gov/news/2424/. The second paper, published in the prestigious journal Ecology, is entitled “Stochastic dilution effects weaken deterministic effects of niche-based processes in species rich forests.” This analysis shows how ecological interactions among many species can lead to distribution patterns that appear random compared with species’ distributions in less diverse forests. Both papers used data collected since 2008 by Cofrin Center for Biodiversity staff and dozens of UW-Green Bay students at the Wabikon Forest Dynamics Plot near Crandon, Wisconsin, under the supervision of Wolf, Howe, former Herbarium Curator Gary Fewless, and UW-Green Bay graduates and botanists Kathryn Corio and Juniper Sundance