John Allen Shuey

The Nature Conservancy · Indiana Field Office

This was originally going to be just a descriptive table explaining how many species we sampled at each sample site relative to the total species pool sampled. But when I converted it to percent total species pool by site – there is an obvious visual trend. As you move from native prairie – through high-diversity restoration, low diversity plantings, and then ag field, the percent of the species pool declines. The raw species counts don’t lend themselves to analysis – but the percentages seem interesting.

This will be part of a paper that looks at insect community response to habitat restoration and this is not a critical analysis – but it’s interesting insomuch as it supports the general thesis of the paper – that you can create usable habitat for regionally imperiled insect communities via restoration.

I've attached both raw and % data

Here’s a convoluted question.  First some back-ground.

Over the last 20+ years, we (Indiana TNC) have planted a 2,500+ acres of forest on ex-agricultural land across Indiana (USA).   In all cases, these forest restorations were performed to restore ecological processes (primarily nutrient removal from surface water and to increase groundwater recharge rates) or to buffer biodiversity conservation areas (primarily by reducing edge to volume ratios in fragmented landscapes).  I want to understand if carbon sequestration creates “added value” that can be used to further justify this rather expensive program.

Without investing in new data collection – I’m looking for approaches that will get me reasonable sequestration estimates for these projects.  

How would you approach this?

Information that I have in hand includes precise acreages planted – date of planting, planting densities, species mixes and we can probably get soil type easily.  I also have solid estimates of “standing biomass” for all forest types across the state (note that these do not include below-ground biomass estimates).  From this data, I can get above-ground estimates for “mature” forest (~80 years old).

What I’m really missing is below ground biomass estimates and accumulation rates, and accumulation rates in general during the initial decades of forest establishment.  And then, ideas on how to apply such info to my specific plantings….

I’m looking for your good ideas on how to approach this (in other words, if you’re just trying to impact your scores – stick a sock in it).

Thanks,

John

We just released a few bison into a grassland restoration unit of about 1,000 acres.  We wanted to assess dung beetle community recovery in response to the animals.  When we set out baited pitfall traps – it’s like we are sampling the inverse of what we expected.  The traps in grasslands with no bison have lots of beetles.  The units with the bison..., our traps are essentially empty.  Our assumption is that there is too much “competition” in the pasture for our traps to attract much attention.

Does anyone have any suggestions about how we may still sample this insect community – perhaps a more passive way of sampling dung beetles?

I just ran a Mantel test between Bray-Curtis matrices of plants and bees at a site.  The Mantel says that the matrices are "almost" significantly correlated (P=0.06) but a traditional correlation say that they are not (P=0.95 R-sq 0.0).  Waht is going on????  all the other alayses make perfect scense - but this one set of relationships is completely screwy.  Any insights?

The attached file has a plot attached with Mantel P values for each analysis

John.

This species has historically been known as Viola rafinesquii and considered an exotic species in North America, but recently changed names and status to a native in some literature.  As at TNCer, my ability to track down the rational for this change has been elusive (we're cheap as have access to low end literature resources!).  Can anyone help me track down the basis of that change?