Quentin D ReadAgricultural Research Service | ARS
Quentin D Read
PhD
About
66
Publications
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Introduction
Quentin is a statistician/data scientist at the USDA Agricultural Research Service, located on the campus of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. He has done research on environmental economics (food waste), macroecology (continental-scale patterns of biodiversity), and plant ecology (functional traits on elevation gradients under climate change). See quentinread.com for more details.
Publications
Publications (66)
Food loss and waste (FLW) contribute significantly to the global food system’s economic and environmental burdens, including substantial greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, resource depletion, and waste management challenges. In alignment with the European Commission’s sustainability objectives and U.N. Sustainable Development Goal 12.3, this study exp...
BACKGROUND
Herbivory risk is mediated by plant traits related to nutrition and defense that can vary within a species by genotype and age. Prior herbivore damage accrued by a plant can also interact with these traits to alter future herbivory potential by changing plant quantity or quality. Sugarcane ( Saccharum spp.) is a perennial crop where abov...
The effects of crop rotation and winter cover crops on soybean yield and colony forming units of Macrophomina phaseolina, the cause of charcoal rot (CR), are poorly understood. A field trial was conducted from 2011 to 2015 to evaluate 1) the impact of crop rotation consisting of soybean (Glycine max (L.) following cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.), so...
Microbes in floral nectar can impact both their host plants and floral visitors, yet little is known about the nectar microbiome of most pollinator-dependent crops. In this study, we examined the abundance and composition of the fungi and bacteria inhabiting Vaccinium spp. nectar, as well as nectar volume and sugar concentrations, hypothesizing tha...
Management is critical to maximize cover crop benefits, while minimizing costs. However, cover crop performance and cost can vary without consistent management strategies. Therefore, we investigated how four planting dates (late October, early November, late November, and early December), two seeding rates (67 and 101 kg ha ⁻¹ ), and four N rates (...
The classic immunoblot technique is an important tool for identification and characterization of target proteins. However, a standard protocol for this classic immunoblot assay involves many steps that may cause experimental variations in each step and make quantification of antibodies in sera difficult. A capillary electrophoresis-based immunoblot...
The narrow genetic base of the US soybean ( Glycine max [L.] Merr.) crop makes it vulnerable to emerging abiotic and biotic stress challenges, and limits resiliency of the soybean crop to meet changes in consumer demand for improved seed composition and agronomic performance. The United States Department of Agriculture Glycine soja (Siebold & Zucc....
Easy-to-use methods to disinfect microbes on seeds are not available. In the present study, rice 30 seeds were irradiated by 274 nanometer germicidal ultraviolet proton in a biosafe flow cabinet. Seeds (10) without any barrier, in a sterilized mesh bag, or in a sterilized coin envelope were removed each day with sterilized forceps for seven days af...
Fusarium head blight is among the chief threats to profitable barley production, and fungicide applications are one of two main strategies for reducing FHB damage to barley crops. However, there is very little published information on optimal timing of such applications. A four-year field study was conducted with winter barley in Raleigh, North Car...
Abstract The United States official soybean (Glycine max L.) test weight (TW) is 75.7 kg hL−1 (60 lb bu−1). This standard is used to convert the weight of a load of soybean into bushels. Typically, when TW falls below 68.4 kg hL−1, (54 lb bu−1), growers may receive discounted payments. In recent years, the average TW of soybean appears to have decl...
Soybean (Glycine max [L.] Merr.) production is influenced by planting date, but its impact on yield in fields infested with Macrophomina phaseolina (Tassi) Goid. is unknown. A 3-year study was conducted in M. phaseolina-infested fields to assess the effects of planting date (PD) on disease severity and yield using eight genotypes, four of which are...
Life history variation in trees is a ubiquitous feature of tropical forests that may facilitate the niche partitioning of light. However, many tests have failed to detect light partitioning by saplings in gaps, which may reflect the stochastic nature of understory light penetration and recruitment. We argue that tree size is a critical component of...
This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of our outreach program “The ImportANTs of ANTs” in communicating scientific topics to elementary school children, using ants as example organisms. In this program’s first phase, we focused on the concepts of native and invasive species and how invasive species affect ecosystems. The program included va...
Citation: Gurung, M.; Rosa, F.; Yelvington, B.; Terry, N.; Read, Q.D.; Piccolo, B.D.; Moody, B.; Tripp, P.; Pittman, H.E., III; Fay, B.L.; et al. Evaluation of a Plant-Based Infant Formula Containing Almonds and Buckwheat on Gut Microbiota Composition, Intestine Morphology, Metabolic and Immune Markers in a Neonatal Piglet Model. Nutrients 2023, 15...
Sweetpotato French fry (SPFF) textures have been previously correlated with starch contents, but little is known about the relationship of starch properties with SPFF textures. Associations of SPFF textures with starch properties were explored by comparing starch thermal properties (gelatinization temperatures and starch type percentages), amylopec...
Salmonella enterica is a major cause of human foodborne illness and is often attributed to poultry food sources. S. enterica serovar Infantis, specifically those carrying the pESI plasmid, has become a frequently isolated serotype from poultry meat samples at processing and has caused numerous recent human infections. In 2016, the USDA- Food Safety...
Topographic wetness index (TWI) is used as a proxy for soil moisture, but how well it performs across varying timescales and methods of calculation is not well understood. To assess the effectiveness of TWI, we examined spatial correlations between in situ soil volumetric water content (VWC) and TWI values over 5 years in soils at 42 locations in a...
A growing body of work examines the direct and indirect effects of climate change on ecosystems, typically by using manipulative experiments at a single site or performing meta-analyses across many independent experiments. However, results from single-site studies tend to have limited generality. Although meta-analytic approaches can help overcome...
Genomic selection (GS) has been demonstrated to enhance the selection process in breeding programs. The objectives of this study were to experimentally evaluate different GS methods in sugarcane hybrids and to determine the prospect of GS in future breeding approaches. Using sugar and yield-related trait data from 432 sugarcane clones and 10,435 si...
Silicon (Si) accumulation in plants confers a mechanical barrier to insect herbivory and may alter plant chemistry to increase the attraction of natural enemies to host insect herbivores on Si−treated plants. The fall armyworm (FAW), Spodoptera frugiperda, is a major insect pest of grain crops, including maize (Zea mays L.). This study examined whe...
Assessment of socio-environmental problems and the search for solutions often require intersecting geospatial data on environmental factors and human population densities. In the United States, Census data is the most common source for information on population. However, timely acquisition of such data at sufficient spatial resolution can be proble...
Aim
Rapid global change is impacting the diversity of tree species and essential ecosystem functions and services of forests. It is therefore critical to understand and predict how the diversity of tree species is spatially distributed within and among forest biomes. Satellite remote sensing platforms have been used for decades to map forest struct...
The productivity of ecosystems and their capacity to support life depends on access to reactive nitrogen (N). Over the past century, humans have more than doubled the global supply of reactive N through industrial and agricultural activities. However, long-term records demonstrate that N availability is declining in many regions of the world. React...
Significance
The food system’s negative impact on biodiversity is increasing over time. Conserving biodiversity requires immediate and widespread action to reduce the biodiversity footprint of food consumption, but biodiversity has historically been neglected in sustainability assessments. We combine high-resolution estimates of the biodiversity fo...
Spring mix is a popular packaged salad that contains lettuce (Lactuca sativa L.) as one of its main ingredients. Plants for baby leaf lettuce (BLL) production are grown at very high densities, which enhances the occurrence of bacterial leaf spot (BLS) caused by Xanthomonas hortorum pv. vitians (Xhv), a disease that can make the crop unmarketable. T...
Highlights
Peanut drying wagon internal airflow simulation and visualization.
Comparison of computer fluid dynamic (CFD) solutions to measured air speed.
Modeling of airflow through masses of in-shell peanuts.
Information is lacking about airflow through masses of drying in-shell peanuts in drying wagons because of the difficulties encountered in...
The loss of aboveground plant diversity alters belowground ecosystem function; yet, the mechanisms underpinning this relationship and the degree to which plant community structure and climate mediate the effects of plant species loss remain unclear. Here, we explored how plant species loss through experimental removal shaped belowground function in...
![FIGURE 4 | BEF across trophic levels. Bottom up [(A-I), purple] and top...](publication/352403230/figure/fig2/AS:1034946726604801@1623761936734/BEF-across-trophic-levels-Bottom-up-A-I-purple-and-top-down-J-R-orange_Q320.jpg)
Global declines in biodiversity have the potential to affect ecosystem function, and vice versa, in both terrestrial and aquatic ecological realms. While many studies have considered biodiversity-ecosystem function (BEF) relationships at local scales within single realms, there is a critical need for more studies examining BEF linkages among ecolog...
At least 30% of food is wasted during the journey from farm to processor to retailer to consumer in the United States, accounting for an estimated 20% of the environmental impact of the food system. The food waste problem is well characterized, but solutions are not: there has been little rigorous comparison of the costs and potential benefits of f...
Abstract The impacts of warming on communities and ecosystems are predicted to be significant in mountain ecosystems because physiological processes, including rates of carbon (C) cycling, are often more temperature‐sensitive in colder environments. Plant biodiversity can also influence C exchange, yet few studies integrate how biotic and abiotic f...
Water scarcity is a pervasive threat to society that is expected to intensify alongside a growing and more affluent population and a changing climate. In this paper, we review the existing literature to assess the potential of lessening water scarcity by reducing food loss and waste. Existing studies reveal the scope of food loss and waste and its...
Two common approaches to conserving biodiversity are conserving the actors (species) and conserving the stage (habitat). Many management efforts focus on conserving the actors, but a major challenge to this strategy is uncertainty surrounding how species’ geographic ranges might shift in response to global change, including climate and land use cha...
The competition for light has long been regarded as a key axis of niche partitioning that promotes forest diversity, but available evidence is contradictory. Despite strong tradeoffs between growth and survival with light, field tests suggest neutral forces govern tree composition across forest gaps and resource use between size classes. Here we in...
Aim
We may be able to buffer biodiversity against the effects of ongoing climate change by prioritizing the protection of habitat with diverse physical features (high geodiversity) associated with ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that maintain high biodiversity. Nonetheless, the relationships between biodiversity and habitat vary with spatial...
Reducing food loss and waste (FLW) is widely recognized as an important lever for lowering the environmental impacts of food systems. The United Nations Sustainable Development Agenda includes a goal to reduce FLW by 50% by 2030. Given differences in resource inputs along the food supply chain (FSC), the environmental benefits of FLW reduction will...
Reducing food loss and waste (FLW) is critical for achieving healthy diets from sustainable food systems. Within the United States, 30% to 50% of food produced is lost or wasted. These losses occur throughout multiple stages of the food supply chain from production to consumption. Reducing FLW prevents the waste of land, water, energy, and other re...
Global change drivers, such as nitrogen (N) deposition and non‐random species extinctions, may shift interactions among aboveground and belowground communities. However, tightly coupled interactions between aboveground and belowground organisms may buffer ecosystems to global change. Here, we test how four years of organic and inorganic N addition...
Issue
Geodiversity (i.e., the variation in Earth's abiotic processes and features) has strong effects on biodiversity patterns. However, major gaps remain in our understanding of how relationships between biodiversity and geodiversity vary over space and time. Biodiversity data are globally sparse and concentrated in particular regions. In contrast...
Research into the relationships among climate, land use, and freshwater insect diversity at different spatial scales in the contiguous United States.
Climate change is expected to favor exotic plant species over native species, because exotics tend to have wider climatic tolerances and greater phenological plasticity, and also because climate change may intensify enemy release. Here, we examine direct effects of warming (+ 1.8 °C above ambient) on plant abundance and phenology, as well as indire...
Ecologists have often predicted that species' niche breadths should decline towards the Equator. Dan Janzen arrived at this prediction based on climatic constraints, while Robert MacArthur argued that a latitudinal gradient in resource specialization drives the pattern. This idea has some support when it comes to thermal niches, but has rarely been...
Temperature is widely regarded as a major driver of species richness, but the mechanisms are debated. Niche theory suggests temperature may affect richness by filtering traits and species in colder habitats while promoting specialization in warmer ones. However, tests of this theory are rare because niche dimensions are challenging to quantify alon...
Significance
Currently, Earth system models (ESMs) represent variation in plant life through the presence of a small set of plant functional types (PFTs), each of which accounts for hundreds or thousands of species across thousands of vegetated grid cells on land. By expanding plant traits from a single mean value per PFT to a full distribution per...
Questions
Is it possible to predict the composition of local plant assemblages? Trait‐based approaches have offered some promise, especially in cases where deterministic processes such as environmental filtering and niche differentiation shape communities. In this study, we asked how much intraspecific variation contributes to trait distributions w...
Macroecology seeks to understand broad-scale patterns in the diversity and abundance of organisms, but macroecologists typically study aboveground macroorganisms. Belowground organisms regulate numerous ecosystem functions, yet we lack understanding of what drives their diversity. Here, we examine the controls on belowground diversity along latitud...
Aims
Decades of empirical work have demonstrated how dominant plant species and nitrogen fertilization can influence the structure and function of plant communities. More recent studies have examined the interplay between these factors, but few such studies use an explicit trait-based framework. In this study, we use an explicit trait-based approac...
Investigating the effects of invasive species on native biodiversity is one of the most pressing challenges in ecology. Our goal in this study was to quantify the effects of invasive plants on butterfly and moth communities. In addition, we sought to elucidate the fitness consequences of non-native hosts on lepidopterans. We conducted a meta-analys...
While an appreciation of plant–soil feedbacks ( PSF ) continues to expand for community and ecosystem ecology, the eco‐evolutionary mechanisms and consequences of such feedbacks remain largely unknown or untested.
Determining the cause and effect of plant phenotypes is central for understanding these eco‐evolutionary dynamics since phenotypes respo...
Recent work has demonstrated that the presence or abundance of specific genotypes, populations, species and phylogenetic clades may influence community and ecosystem properties such as resilience or productivity. Many ecological studies, however, use simple linear models to test for such relationships, including species identity as the predictor va...
The inconsistency of professional development (PD) in teaching for graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) is a widespread problem in higher education. Although GTAs serve an important role in retention of undergraduate science majors and in promotion of scientific literacy in nonmajors, they often lack preparation and ongoing support for teaching. Giv...
Background/Question/Methods
nteractions among organisms can shape biogeochemical cycling. In fact many of the talks in this session explore this topic. These interactions, especially when embedded in different climates, can shape plant traits. Differences among individuals in plant traits, via differences in genotypes and phenotypes, can alter th...
Spatial variation in filters imposed by the abiotic environment causes variation in functional traits within and among plant species. This is abundantly clear for plant species along elevational gradients, where parallel abiotic selection pressures give rise to predictable variation in leaf phenotypes among ecosystems. Understanding the factors res...
Pollinators serve critical roles for the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems, and have an estimated annual value of over $150 billion for global agriculture. Mounting evidence from agricultural systems reveals that pollinators are declining in many regions of the world, and with a lack of information on whether pollinator communities in natural s...
Plant species influence belowground communities in a variety of ways, ultimately impacting nutrient cycling. Functional plant traits provide a means whereby species identity can influence belowground community interactions, but little work has examined whether species identity influences belowground community processes when correcting for evolution...
For competing species to coexist, individuals must compete more with others of the same species than with those of other species. Ecologists search for tradeoffs in how species might partition the environment. The negative correlations among competing species that would be indicative of tradeoffs are rarely observed. A recent analysis showed that e...
Posterior percentiles for parameters: This table contains posterior means and marginal 95% credible intervals for parameter values.
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Questions
Questions (2)
I am interested in the effectiveness of current and future legislation to reduce food waste by standardizing expiration date labeling. However it is difficult to assess this without knowing the current frequencies of different types of expiration date (including "use by", "sell by", "best if used by," etc.). Is there any source of data on how frequently each of these types of dates are used, preferably across different categories of food? It would be preferable to have USA data but other countries would be fine too. Thanks!
Thanks for all your work on this. I am interested in citing the concept of essential geodiversity variables and I was wondering if there is a publication that specifically refers to it.
