Each year, wildlife biologists deploy thousands of echolocation detectors to monitor bat activity and find out what species are present at a site. But pulling these results together in a single place could help us learn more about broader scale patterns of bat activity and their seasonal movements. A new tool, the Bat Acoustic Monitoring Visualization Tool (https://visualize.batamp.databasin.org/), helps to do just that. Since its inception in 2013, users have contributed over 200,000 nights of detector data to BatAMP resulting in an unprecedented collection of results that allows users to track when and where species are detected across the U.S. and Canada. Through ongoing data uploads by a growing set of contributors as well as a planned integration to visualize acoustic data generated via the North American Bat Monitoring Program, this tool will greatly expand our understanding of the seasonal occurrence of bats and how those may change over time.
Dead treetops, their bare branches curving upward, stood dark against a blue sky. Only a few years before, these had been towering, vibrant ash trees, playing a vital role in riparian forest ecosystems of northwest Ohio. Then, the emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis), a shiny green beetle whose voracious maggot-like larva feeds just beneath the bark of the trees, swept through the forests leaving death and destruction in its wake. The emerald ash borer, or EAB, is native to eastern Asia. There, it has little impact on Asian ash species, which are able to mount defenses against the larvae. But in the late 1990s, it was accidentally introduced to North America, arriving near Detroit. Michigan, on wooden shipping material. When EAB reached the nearby forests, it encountered North American ash species that had no co-evolutionary history with the pest and almost no defense. The insect was inadvertently spread by people, moving on firewood, logs and even vehicles. Now, it occurs in 35 U.S. states and five Canadian provinces. Our job was to monitor the effects of this invasive pest. including the decline and death of the ash trees, and the cascading effects of the sudden loss of these tree species on their forest ecosystems.
Frozen in the act of scavenging dinner, the vulture’s head lay on the fox’s abdomen, covering the hole it had been attempting to enlarge. When biologists pulled the bird away, they found not only a healthy looking, though dead, fox underneath, but also scores of insects scattered around. Less than a mile away the scene was repeated. This time the dead animal was a black bear, again with a vulture lying on top of it and numerous insects scattered nearby. These two scenes, which biologists found during raids conducted last year in California’s Lassen National Forest on “trespass marijuana grow sites,”highlight the broad and gruesome nature of wildlife poisoning associated with illegal marijuana cultivation on public, tribal, state and private lands across the United States. Today, growers use a wide variety of legal and illegal toxicants to protect the crop from rodents chewing irrigation lines and omnivores raiding food supplies.
Greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) and monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) and other pollinating insects have garnered a lot of attention recently from federal and state wildlife officials. These two species and pollinators share dwindling sagebrush habitat in the western United States that is putting their populations at risk. Sagebrush landscapes transformed by disturbances often require significant effort to restore their ecological function, and achieving desired results can be far more difficult and slow without the correct strategy. Fortunately, habitat restoration efforts focused on increasing the abundance and diversity of critical forbs can simultaneously benefit all three at-risk populations.
Forests support a variety of ecosystems, species and genes collectively referred to as biological diversity along with important processes that tie these all together. With the growing recognition that biological diversity contributes to human welfare in a number of important ways such as providing food, medicine and fiber (provisioning services); controlling insect pests or water flows (regulating services); furnishing recreation or spiritual fulfillment (cultural services); and providing soil and nutrients for plant growth (supporting services) (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005), societies worldwide are starting to understand that these services depend directly upon the condition of their ecosystems and cannot be taken for granted.
In a patch of sky above Pennsylvania, a golden eagle moves languidly, never flapping but passing quickly as it cruises southward on a cushion of air. It is migrating to its wintering grounds after a season of breeding in Quebec. As part of a team studying eagles on a daily basisa project supported by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), West Virginia University, and other partnerswe never tire of watching these iconic birds soar. The fall migration is especially notable here in the central Appalachians, where golden eagles often migrate at low altitudes, close to those of us who watch them from atop the region's long linear ridges.
