UW researchers identify a potential habitat for endangered European bison

Despite growing numbers, the European bison is not out of the woods yet. iStockphoto via Discovery News

A group of UW-Madison researchers recently published a study of European Bison, finding that the eastern Carpathian Mountains could support future herds of the endangered species.

European Bison barely escaped extinction in the early 20th century and now only live in small isolated herds in Central and Eastern Europe. The species' survival depends on identifying suitable habitat for establishing reintroduced bison herds.

The team from UW-Madison included Botany Professor Don Waller of the College of Letters & Science and Tobias Kuemmerle, the Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and Professor Volker Radeloff — both of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

They found several large, suitable, but currently unoccupied habitat patches exist for future bison herds, particularly in the eastern Carpathians.

The team gathered information about where the bison are succeeding today and overlaid these characteristics with information about what the habitat is like throughout these areas.

Establishing the first European Bison population would be a milestone in efforts to conserve this species in the wild and demonstrate a significant and hopeful step towards conserving large grazers and their ecological roles in human-dominated landscapes across the globe.

For more information:

• Will Bison Roam Europe's Mountains? via Discovery News
  

Category: Biological & Physical Sciences
Tags: ,

Interdisciplinary team launches new efforts to untangle evolutionary histories

Researchers in Botany, Horticulture, Statistics and Computer Scienced, led by Assistant Professor Cecile Ane (Statistics and Botany) are collaborating to find out why different genes tell different stories about the past history of species.

They aim to better understand the variability in vertical transmission of genetic material from generation to generation, and also understand how much horizontal transmission of genetic material has occurred in the past, such as from hybridization between species.

They were awarded NSF funding to integrate powerful statistical methods and software development.

These tools will allow them — and many other evolutionary biologists beyond our campus to extract vertical and horizontal signals from massive genomic data.

Category: Biological & Physical Sciences
Tags: , , ,

Botany team helps make Darwin Day a success

Graduate and undergraduate students stike a pose next to their exhibit tables.

The Botany Department continued its tradition of participating in the Darwin Day festivities February 13, 2010.

The Botany exhibits for Darwin Day were truly a collaborative effort among faculty, staff, and 22 graduate and undergraduate students.

The day provided a number of local youngsters the chance to make models, tiny gardens and see insects and other animals on display. 

See:  Pictures from Darwin Day.

The day included exhibits such as:

Dr. Ken Cameron presented a talk on Charles Darwin and Orchids: Confessions of 201 Year-Old Orchid Fanatic.  Cameron’s lab also demonstrated videos of some of the mechanisms by which orchids achieve cross-pollination, along with a poster showing phylogenetic relationships among the five subfamilies of orchids.

Insects and other arthropods on display during Darwin Day.

The Botany Studio (Kandis Elliot), Plant Growth Facilities (Dr. Mo Fayyaz) and Botany 100 (Marie Trest) and 130 (Mike Clayton) labs supplied posters, live plants, and  preserved specimens. The plant exhibit tables focused on convergent and divergent evolution of organisms.

Category: Biological & Physical Sciences
Tags: ,

Spalding, Botany co-authors publish research on seedling development

The embryo within a seed grows and develops into a seedling through physiological processes studied by Botany Professor Edgar Spalding and members of his laboratory in Birge Hall.

In a publication about to appear in The Plant Journal, Spalding and co-authors (including a Botany undergraduate) explain how a protein in the cell membrane regulates growth of the stem during the seedling establishment process.  The process includes transporting the growth hormone auxin to the elongating cells.

Their experiments utilized mutant seedlings engineered to express a fluorescent protein derived from jellyfish. 

The team also used custom computer algorithms that showed that light sensed by a certain photoreceptor in the cells turns down the auxin transport protein.  This slows stem elongation as the seedling emerges into a lit environment and begins to perform photosynthesis.

This movie shows what happens differently in a mutant lacking the aforementioned photoreceptor.

Category: Biological & Physical Sciences
Tags: ,

Zedler's analysis makes Top 10 download list

UW-Madison Professor Joy Zedler (Botany) and Royal Gardner's (Stetson University) recent analysis of new guidelines for wetland mitigation is on the Top 10 download list for the Social Science Research Network's Environmental Law & Policy articles.

See the top ten list here.

The 2009 paper — "Compensating for wetland losses under the Clean Water Act (Redux): Evaluating the Federal Compensatory Mitigation Regulation" — was published in the Stetson Law Review 38:213-249 by authors R. C. Gardner, J. Zedler, A. Redmond, R. E. Turner, C. A. Johnston, V. A. Alvarez, C. A. Simenstad, K. L. Prestegaard, and W. J. Mitsch.

Category: Biological & Physical Sciences
Tags: ,

Baum celebrates the 'Origin of Species' sesquicentennial

Baum dons a Charles Darwin look in November. Photo by Mo Fayyaz.

UW Botany Professor David Baum recently had a good deal to celebrate.

In November, the college approved the formation of a new institute, The UW-Madison James F. Crow Institute for the Study of Evolution.

November 24th, 2009 also marked the the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species. 

To celebrate both of these events, Baum spent a day dressed as Charles Darwin. 

"Mr. Darwin" — replete with tailcoat and mutton chops — lectured in Botany/Biology/Zoology 151 on mechanisms of evolution and also made a guest appearance in Botany 152 where he read excerpts from the Origin of Species.

Category: Biological & Physical Sciences
Tags: ,

Botanists study restoration of rare wetlands

Dan Larkin (left) records data in a large pool within a 20-acre salt marsh restoration site at Tijuana Estuary in California, just north of the US-Mexico Border. His study was part of his dissertation on the importance of topographic heterogeneity to the restoration of ecosystems services.

Among the many services that wetlands perform, one of them is feeding hungry fish.

In sunny southern California, nutrients borne on high tides turn salt marshes into nurseries that grow algae, algae-eating invertebrates and invertebrate-eating fish.

Dan Larkin (Botany PhD, 2006) and Professor Joy Zedler reported in the journal Ecological Engineering that restoration of these rare wetlands (reduced to <5% of their historical area) quickly provided vital support for coastal food webs. 

Category: Biological & Physical Sciences
Tags: ,