NSF : Food and Fear: Modeling animal tradeoffs shaped by landscape complexity .- Alimentos y miedo: Modelado de compensaciones en forma de animales por la complejidad del paisaje

https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/science_nation/foragingrabbits.jsp?WT.mc_id=USNSF_51

Ecologists take a comprehensive look at sagebrush habitat through the eyes of a small, but important, resident

The Lemhi Valley is a high desert sagebrush steppe environment in eastern Idaho, along the border with Montana. It's a critical habitat and a gorgeous piece of intact sagebrush landscape, according to University of Idaho mammalian ecologist Janet Rachlow. It also happens to be home to the pygmy rabbit, which is the reason Rachlow and her colleague, Washington State University foraging ecologist Lisa Shipley, are here with a group of research students.

Data from tracking collars the team puts on the rabbits and imagery from unmanned aerial vehicles help generate maps that show where and when the rabbits spend their time, and ultimately, how the mammals use and shape this ecosystem.

Rachlow and Shipley, along with Boise State University physiological ecologist Jennifer Forbey, have chosen a broad approach, looking at behavioral, nutritional, chemical, spatial and physiological ecology to evaluate comprehensively the factors that influence habitat use. What they learn about the links between habitat features and habitat use could help inform future decisions involving land management and restoration for these types of environments.

The research in this episode was supported by NSF award #1146166, "Collaborative Research: Modeling the Tradeoffs within Food-, Fear-, and Thermal-Scapes to Explain Habitat Use by Mammalian Herbivores."

Miles O'Brien, Science Nation Correspondent
Kate Tobin, Science Nation Producer

 

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Long loathed as a threat and nuisance, the wolf population in Yellowstone National Park was essentially wiped out by the mid-1920s. That changed in 1995, when the National Park Service reintroduced wolves there, with the goal of restoring a natural predator/prey dynamic to the landscape. Find out more in this Science Nation video.
Credit: Science Nation, National Science Foundation

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The seasonality of bird migration is shifting in response to climate change. As a result, birds in the United States are arriving at their northern breeding grounds earlier in spring -- and may be departing later in fall. Scientists supported by NSF made the migration shift discovery thanks to information aggregated from two sources: remote-sensing data from weather surveillance radar and ground-based data collected in citizen science databases. Find out more in this discovery.
Credit: Kyle Horton

Environmental Biology (DEB)

The Division of Environmental Biology (DEB) of the Biological Sciences Directorate supports fundamental research on populations, species, communities and ecosystems. Scientific emphases range across many evolutionary and ecological patterns and processes at all spatial and temporal scales.

NSF awards $15.9 million to foster new understanding of biological systems on regional to continental scales

Macrosystems biology might be called biological sciences writ large. To better detect, understand and predict the effects of climate and land-use changes on organisms and ecosystems at these large scales, the NSF Directorate for Biological Sciences has awarded $15.9 million for 12 new MacroSystems Biology and Early NEON (National Ecological Observatory Network) Science projects.

 

ESA

Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui

ayabaca@gmail.com

ayabaca@yahoo.com

ayabaca@hotmail.com

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NASA : NASA Challenges Designers to Construct Habitat for Deep Space Exploration.- NASA Retos Diseñadores para Construir Hábitat para la exploración profunda del espacio... como visitar Marte por ejemplo...

Hola amigos: A VUELO DE UN QUINDE EL BLOG., hemos recibido información de la Agencia Espacial NASA, del empeño que está poniendo sobre los diseños y construcción de hábitat, para realizar viajes al profundo espacio, como por ejemplo visitar a Marte.

More information....

http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-challenges-designers-to-construct-habitat-for-deep-space-exploration

Credits: NASA

NASA and the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute, known as America Makes, are holding a new $2.25 million competition to design and build a 3-D printed habitat for deep space exploration, including the agency’s journey to Mars.

The multi-phase 3-D Printed Habitat Challenge, part of NASA's Centennial Challenges program, is designed to advance the additive construction technology needed to create sustainable housing solutions for Earth and beyond.

Shelter is among the most basic and crucial human needs, but packing enough materials and equipment to build a habitat on a distant planet would take up valuable cargo space that could be used for other life-sustaining provisions. The ability to manufacture a habitat using indigenous materials, combined with material that would otherwise be waste from the spacecraft, would be invaluable.

The first phase of the competition, announced Saturday at the Bay Area Maker Faire in San Mateo, California, runs through Sept. 27. This phase, a design competition, calls on participants to develop state-of-the-art architectural concepts that take advantage of the unique capabilities 3-D printing offers. The top 30 submissions will be judged and a prize purse of $50,000 will be awarded at the 2015 World Maker Faire in New York.

"The future possibilities for 3-D printing are inspiring, and the technology is extremely important to deep space exploration," said Sam Ortega, Centennial Challenges program manager. "This challenge definitely raises the bar from what we are currently capable of, and we are excited to see what the maker community does with it."

The second phase of the competition is divided into two levels. The Structural Member Competition (Level 1) focuses on the fabrication technologies needed to manufacture structural components from a combination of indigenous materials and recyclables, or indigenous materials alone. The On-Site Habitat Competition (Level 2) challenges competitors to fabricate full-scale habitats using indigenous materials or indigenous materials combined with recyclables. Both levels open for registration Sept. 26, and each carries a $1.1 million prize.

Winning concepts and products will help NASA build the technical expertise to send habitat-manufacturing machines to distant destinations, such as Mars, to build shelters for the human explorers who follow. On Earth, these capabilities may be used one day to construct affordable housing in remote locations with limited access to conventional building materials.

"America Makes is honored to be a partner in this potentially revolutionary competition," said Ralph Resnick, founding director of America Makes. "We believe that 3D printing/Additive Manufacturing has the power to fundamentally change the way people approach design and construction for habitats, both on earth and off, and we are excitedly awaiting submissions from all types of competitors.”

America Makes is a public/private partnership of organizations focused on accelerating the capabilities and adoption of additive manufacturing technology.

The Centennial Challenges Program is managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama for the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information about the 3-D-Printed Habitat Challenge, visit:

http://AmericaMakes.us/Challenge

and

www.nasa.gov/3DPHab

-end-

Joshua Buck
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1130
jbuck@nasa.gov

Janet Anderson
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.
256-544-0034
janet.l.anderson@nasa.gov

Scott Deutsch
America Makes
724-539-4760
scott.deutsch@ncdmm.com

Last Updated: May 17, 2015

Editor: Karen Northon

Tags:  3D Printing, Journey to Mars,

NASA
Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui
ayabaca@gmail.com
ayabaca@hotmail.com
ayabaca@yahoo.com
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nsf.gov - National Science Foundation - Seed dispersal study shows value of conservation corridors

Ecologists study how wind moves seeds through longleaf pines

Seeds and flowers of the wind-dispersed species Solidago odora, part of the corridor experiment. Credit and Larger Version

February 24, 2014

Field ecologists go to great lengths to get data. Radio collars and automatic video cameras are among their tools for documenting the natural world.

So when a group of ecologists set out to see how wind moves seeds through isolated patches of habitat carved into a longleaf pine plantation, they came up with a novel way of addressing this question. They twisted colored yarn to create mock seeds that would drift with the wind much like native seeds.

The scientists discovered that both wind and the corridors between the patches of habitat matter to seed dispersal in the longleaf pine forest.

Their experimental "seeds" were dusted with fluorescent powder and inserted into custom-made boxes mounted on poles, then released as the scientists monitored local wind conditions.

That night, the field crew returned for a black-light treasure hunt, locating more than 80 percent of the fake seeds, which glowed under the ultraviolet light.

The paths of these glowing seeds were matched with output from a computer model to produce the first accurate picture of how wind moves seeds through corridors linking two patches of habitat.

The study results are published in a paper in this week's issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Conservation biologists have long discussed building conservation corridors to link isolated patches of protected land.

"Understanding the conservation impact of corridors is at the cutting edge of conservation," says lead paper author Ellen Damschen, a zoologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Corridors are designed to improve conditions for uncommon native species living in separated habitats.

Small populations in these "islands" of habitat may be killed by storms or disease. They may lack genetic diversity and be prone to inbreeding. And they may be unable to reach new habitat.

"It makes intuitive sense that these connections could foster genetic and biological diversity," says Damschen. "But there has been little scientific evidence for if and how they work."

Most of the studies have involved animals, she adds, even though plants provide the basic energy and structure to land ecosystems.

Wind matters for the movement of seeds and whole organisms, Damschen says. "In many open habitats, more than one-third of plants are wind dispersed, but there are also insects, spiders, pathogens and fungi that move on the wind."

The experiment, supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Forest Service, began in 2000 with the creation of eight groups of patches at the Savannah River Site, a large holding of the U.S. Department of Energy. Each set of patches was built at a different orientation to prevailing winds.

"Relatively few researchers have investigated the effects of habitat configuration on wind-dispersed species," says Betsy Von Holle, a program director in NSF's Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research. "This study demonstrates that influences on wind-dispersed species are more complex than previously thought."

A research group of meteorologists and ecologists found that corridors increased the movement of wind and of their glowing artificial seeds, echoing the results of a computer model developed by Gil Bohrer at The Ohio State University, a paper co-author.

And when Damschen and colleagues counted newly dispersed plants over the 12-year experiment, they found that a corridor linking two patches of land indeed promotes the diversity of plants dispersed by wind - especially if the corridor is oriented roughly parallel to the prevailing winds.

Both the data and the model showed that wind speeds up in certain areas of the patches, and that a strong vertical air movement is present.

"Uplift is important because the wind tends to be faster higher above the ground," Damschen says, "and uplift can lead to long-distance dispersal, which is significant for moving plants around the landscape."

That's why the study matters for conservation biology, Damschen says.

"We predicted that corridors in line with the dominant winds would move more species, and this is what we found. Wind alignment matters for species diversity in conservation areas."

The results are especially relevant to threatened Midwestern ecosystems like grasslands, prairies and savannas, where big bluestem and milkweed are two of many native plants that loft their seeds on the wind.

"In conservation science, it is often assumed that wind-dispersed seeds can go everywhere, but that's not true," Damschen says.

"Wind direction, and the shape of the habitat, control where these seeds go.

"While this adds another factor to consider in management of natural areas, the information is on the table so we can make better decisions about how to achieve management goals."

Other co-authors of the paper are: Dirk Baker of the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Ran Nathan of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; John Orrock of the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Jay Turner of Washington University in St. Louis; Lars Brudvig of Michigan State University; Nick Haddad of North Carolina State University; Doug Levey of the University of Florida, Gainesville; and Joshua Tewksbury of the University of Washington.

-NSF-

Media Contacts Cheryl Dybas, NSF, (703) 292-7734, cdybas@nsf.gov
David Tenenbaum, U. Wisconsin-Madison, (608) 265-8549,

djtenenb@wisc.edu

Related WebsitesConservation Corridor Digests:

 http://www.conservationcorridor.org/#

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. In fiscal year (FY) 2014, its budget is $7.2 billion. NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 colleges, universities and other institutions. Each year, NSF receives about 50,000 competitive requests for funding, and makes about 11,500 new funding awards. NSF also awards about $593 million in professional and service contracts yearly.

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Aerial view of a conservation corridor experiment shows four patches of habitat in a pine forest.
Credit and Larger Version

Meteorological towers measured three-dimensional wind speed as part of the study.
Credit and Larger Version

Glow-in-the-dark seeds were created to determine whether corridors affect where seeds go.
Credit and Larger Version

Dirk Baker releases seeds that glow in the dark; seeds are retrieved at night with a black light.
Credit and Larger Version

 The National Science Foundation (NSF)
Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui
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ayabaca@hotmail.com
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