Human activities have greatly impacted terrestrial ecosystems through various forms of habitat modification including the creation of powerline corridors. The routine maintenance of powerline corridors to prevent vegetation interference with electricity transmission lines leads …
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Platanthera is one of the largest genera of temperate orchids and exemplifies a lineage that has adaptively radiated into diverse habitats within North America, Asia, Europe, North Africa, Borneo, and Sarawak. Major centers of diversity in this genus are western North America an…
Climate change and human land management can cause desertification. The latter phenomenon is an environmental issue affecting many drylands on Earth. During previous decades many regions were affected by desertification, and various other areas are at risk of becoming so. Desert…
Vast areas of lowland tropical rainforest have been converted to anthropogenic grasslands by the synergistic effects of logging, agriculture, and recurring fire. These degraded areas are susceptible to colonization by invasive species. In Borneo, which has experienced the highes…
After chestnut blight, caused by the accidental introduction of the pathogenic fungus Cryphonectria parasitica , ravaged American chestnut (Castanea dentata ) populations, other chestnut species attracted more interest because blight resistance was of primary concern. Therefore,…
Development of a forest is influenced by various factors often resulting in spatially autocorrelated patterns. Depending on the underlying spatial process in a forest, a forest will exhibit aggregated patterns of similarities or dissimilarities among spatial attributes close in …
Niche differentiation is argued as one of the mechanisms explaining species coexistence. Despite their sessile nature, similar resource needs and traits to acquire and utilize resources closely related plant species coexist. I hypothesized that i) spatial distribution of congene…
The tropical, flowering shrubs in the genus Erythroxylum (230 species) are commonly known as coca. For 8,000 years, two Erythroxylum species have been exploited for their production of cocaine. Coca plants remain culturally significant and economically important. Yet, their orig…
Rattus tanezumi and Rattus argentiventer are the major rice field rats in the Philippines. The Philippines is the number one rice exporter in the world and the annual losses from rodents range from 5-10%. This figure can increase to 30-50% during an outbreak year. In 2007 and 20…
Aboriginal communities in the northern Ontario region utilize an abundance of locally grown medicinal plants. However, no prior documentation or phytochemical studies on the northern Ontario medicinal plants existed in literature. This prompted me to exploit the ethnobotanical r…
The myrrh genus, Commiphora , comprises a clade of nearly 200 species of shrubs and trees that grow in warm tropical regions in Africa, Madagascar, the Arabian Peninsula, the Indian sub-continent, and South America. Commiphora is the most species-rich genus in the frankincense a…
It is uncertain that novel forests have similar attributes and provide same ecological services as those of native secondary forests. I studied the structure and functioning of novel forests dominated by Castilla elastica , an introduced tree in Puerto Rico, and compared traits …
The xeric sandhills on Carolina Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge have a monospecific overstory of longleaf pine and an understory dominated by turkey oak and wiregrass. The understory vegetation is spatially heterogeneous within stands, with small patches dominated by either t…
The fungus Corynespora cassiicola (Berk. & Curt.) Wei is a pathogen, endophyte, and saprophyte. It can be found growing on at least 530 plant species from 380 genera, primarily in the tropics. Isolates from diverse hosts were collected or solicited from locations in American Sam…
Citrullus colocynthis (L.) Schrad, closely related to watermelon (Citrullus lanatus (Thunb.) Matsum. & Nakai.), is a member of the Cucurbitaceae family. This plant is a drought tolerant species with a deep root system, widely distributed in the Sahara-Arabian deserts in Africa a…
Local ecological knowledge systems are dynamic expressions of perceiving and understanding the world, which have historically made and continue to make valuable contributions to ecology and conservation science. This dissertation examines the process and outcomes of integrating …