Streams have to start somewhere, but their beginning can be ambiguous. The smallest headwater streams — ‘first-order’ streams that have no smaller tributaries — are usually ephemeral, flowing only at snowmelt or after heavy rains. One relatively definite beginning point is the highest point where these headwater streams establish an …
Art and science are different things, right? Well, maybe not so much. Yes, the two enterprises usually play out in different social and institutional contexts. In academia, they’re sequestered into distinct departments in different buildings, and all academics know that you never talk with anybody in a different building. But there …
The upcoming HMWF newsletter features two researchers who have been documenting, over the last several years, the huge biodiversity of moths at Huron Mt. I’ve written about this work before, but wanted to recognize a recent achievement by one of these researchers in another arena. Dr. Thomas Werner (Michigan Technological …
Increasingly, ecological questions call for ‘big picture’ perspectives in space and time. It’s not so much that these questions are new — they aren’t — but that new tools and approaches are making them, for the first time, rigorously addressable. Synoptic views from satellites and air-borne sensors, techniques for analyzing …
In science, new findings often raise more questions than they answer. That seems to be the case with recently published research on the lake trout (or lake charr) of Rush Lake, where two distinct forms of the species coexist. The origins of this unusual scenario are ambiguous, and it may, …
[Warning: this is a longer-than-usual post. Biological diversity is something worth dwelling on…] All-taxa Biodiversity Inventories (ATBIs) are efforts to fully document biological diversity — list all the species — for some defined area. The value of such documentation, in a world where all the indications are that we’re …
We have our first ‘guest blogger’. At the Foundation’s annual meeting in early August, Dr. Evelyn Williams received the Manierre Award, awarded annually in recognition of recent, peer-reviewed publication of Foundation-sponsored work at the Huron Mountains. Evelyn is a conservation scientist at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Her award-winning publications spring …
I’ve been negligent, the last few months, in posting to the blog. I will break silence with a general update but will follow soon with some posts about ongoing and new research projects. If you have not already received the latest Huron Mt. Wildlife Foundation newsletter, you can find it …
Documentation of “reference ecosystems” like the pristine landscape of the Huron Mts. is critical for understanding the ‘baseline’ behavior of ecological processes without the confusing effects of a history of intensive human management; without such studies, it is impossible to fully assess effects of long-term environmental changes. However, the value …
Researchers keep discovering new layers of biological diversity, so perhaps it should not be surprising to learn that there are hundreds (maybe thousands?) of species of poorly known fungi living inside the plants and lichens of the Huron Mountains. These endophytic fungi — fungi that live within the tissues of plants without causing …
