Sentences with phrase «by plant ecologist»

The soil on Mars may be suitable for cultivating food crops — this is the prognosis of a study by plant ecologist Wieger Wamelink of Wageningen...

However, last August a team headed by plant ecologist Allison Snow at Ohio State University demonstrated that this same gene might produce some very tough weeds: She found that wild sunflowers crossed with Bt sunflowers produced offspring that suffered significantly less insect - related damage and produced 50 percent more seeds than control plants without the gene.

Not exact matches

It also provides a basis for the value of the wild plants and animals expressed by many contemporary ecologists.

«In these environments that are dominated by marine plants, photosynthesis and respiration cause large differences in CO2 concentrations and the addition of anthropogenic carbon make these day - to - night differences even larger than they would be without that extra carbon,» said George Waldbusser, an Oregon State marine ecologist and co-author on the study, who serves as Pacella's Ph.D. adviser.

Laborious research in the 1960s by the late pioneering U.S. ecologist Eugene Odum seemed to indicate that forests achieve a balance between the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) absorbed by growing trees and plants and the amount of CO2 released back into the atmosphere by the decomposition of dead plant matter.

Today, much of the abandoned farmland where second - generation bioenergy crops could grow is degraded and dominated by invasive plants, says Phil Robertson, an ecologist at Michigan State University's W. K. Kellogg Biological Station in Hickory Corners.

And with more than 500 species of plants and animals now threatened with extinction, New Zealand's ecologists are keen to make the most of the isolation provided by the country's 600 offshore islands.

The scientific study of invasions dates to 1958, with the publication of The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants by the English ecologist Charles Elton.

Thomas Givnish, a plant ecologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, adds that the hypothesis could be strengthened by «exposing these plants to... emus or ostriches to demonstrate that these traits deter browsing by birds.»

But the latest study, by ecologists Peter Reich and Sarah Hobbie at the University of Minnesota in St Paul, suggests that estimates of how much CO2 land plants can use are far too optimistic.

A team led by University of California, Santa Barbara plant ecologist Shelley Crausbay is studying high - elevation cloud forests that provide habitat for a number of rare birds, most of which are endangered.

Diverse plant communities are more successful and enable higher crop yields than pure monocultures, a European research team headed by ecologists from the University of Zurich has discovered.

Brown University ecologist Marc Tatar says the current study, published in this week's Science, provides «really profound evidence» that longevity is controlled not by actual resources but rather by hormones that are cued to resources (such as the way plants sense winter by sunlight changes).

In fact, says Helliker, infrared imaging of trees has already shown that their leaves can be warmer than the surrounding air by several degrees, as was reported last year by Christian Körner, a plant ecologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland.

Applying this hypothesis to 122 forest plots catalogued by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama — ranging from the drier Pacific side of the isthmus to the wetter Caribbean side — plant ecologist Bettina Engelbrecht and her colleagues demonstrated that drought controls plant distribution.

Western Wildfires — The increasingly destructive and widespread fire seasons of recent years are likely to continue due to a combination of increased drought and land development encroaching on naturally burning landscapes, along with a climate change — induced fuel boom (enhanced plant growth and a shift to more woody species) exacerbated by fire - suppression efforts leading to more abundant plant matter to fuel violent blazes, according to ecologist Dominique Bachelet of Oregon State University in Corvallis and The Nature Conservancy.

John Orrock, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, usually studies how animals behave when they're at risk of being attacked, but became intrigued by the ability plants have to also respond to threats.

The Land Institute's work, led by a team of plant breeders and ecologists in multiple partnerships worldwide, is focused on developing perennial grains, pulses and oilseed bearing plants to be grown in ecologically intensified, diverse crop mixtures known as perennial polycultures.

Many scientists and ecologists now believe that keeping those ecosystems intact offers a far greater greenhouse gas - reducing benefit — by not disturbing the carbon stored within native plants and in untilled soil — than any benefit which might be conferred by burning ethanol instead of petroleum.

It will sequester only so much carbon, but there are sure to be other benefits, according to some fresh thinking by a distinguished plant ecologist.

But the latest study, by ecologists Peter Reich and Sarah Hobbie at the University of Minnesota in St Paul, suggests that estimates of how much CO2 land plants can use are far too optimistic.

How a plant optimizes among these competing functions can have major ecological implications, which have been under - appreciated by ecologists compared to the focus they have given to leaf function.