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New BASF biofungicide uses UD patents

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Velondis biofungicide contains beneficial microbe to help plants fight fungal disease

Janine Sherrier (left), professor of plant and soil sciences, and colleague Harsh Bais, associate professor of plant and soil sciences at UD, were the lead inventors on the patent, which the University has licensed exclusively to BASF. The two professors, along with co-inventor Venkatachalam Lakshmanan, led collaborative research teams studying the microorganism.

The Environmental Protection Agency has registered BASF’s new Velondis brand biofungicide seed treatment formulations, which contain a patented University of Delaware beneficial microbe to help plants fight fungal disease. With potential applications in agriculture, horticulture and forestry, the products are designed to boost the protection of seedlings and plants from key soil-borne diseases.

The bacteria in Velondis produce a beneficial biofilm and antimicrobial components that promote systemic resistance within the plant, resulting in suppression of disease organisms that attach to root systems. Two of the Velondis biofungicides have additional components that help plants produce a more vigorous root system, resulting in improved plant growth and yield potential.

beneficial microbe Bacillus subtilis
BASF’s Velondis biofungicides contain a strain of the beneficial microbe Bacillus subtilis, which naturally lives in soil and on the surface of plant roots. Scientists at the University of Delaware’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources conducted research on the microbe with initial support from USDA HATCH funds, and additional funding from the Delaware Biotechnology Institute, the National Science Foundation and BASF. The microbe helps boost the protection of seedlings and plants from soil-borne diseases.

“Velondis biofungicides mark a major step for BASF in the use of natural biologicals to help plants fight disease,” said Justin Clark, a technical marketing manager with BASF. “We plan to use this new active ingredient in a number of different products and applications to help improve disease control and increase crop yield potential.”

A key microorganism incorporated in the new Velondis formulations is a unique strain of Bacillus subtilis, a natural, beneficial bacterium that lives on the surface of roots and the surrounding soil, or rhizosphere.

Scientists at UD’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources and the Delaware Biotechnology Institute (DBI) conducted research on the beneficial bacterium with initial support from USDA HATCH funds, and additional funding from DBI, the National Science Foundation and BASF. The University’s Office of Economic Innovation and Partnerships also provided funding and significant intellectual property management.

Janine Sherrier, professor of plant and soil sciences, and colleague Harsh Bais, associate professor of plant and soil sciences at UD, were the lead inventors on the patent, which the University has licensed exclusively to BASF. The two professors, along with co-inventor Venkatachalam Lakshmanan, led collaborative research teams studying the microorganism.

“At the University of Delaware, we’re able to pursue early discovery work, with the ultimate aim of providing safe and effective tools for growers,” said Sherrier. “The translation of basic research into commercial products is an arduous path, so we are pleased that our work has resulted in the development of new products for agriculture such as Velondis biofungicides.”

Velondis biofungicides will be used in different facets of agriculture and will initially be labeled for use with soybeans in spring 2018. Growers can learn more about Velondis biofungicides by visiting BASF Ag Products or by contacting their local BASF representative.

About BASF’s Crop Protection division

With a rapidly growing population, the world is increasingly dependent on our ability to develop and maintain sustainable agriculture and healthy environments. BASF’s Crop Protection division works with farmers, agricultural professionals, pest management experts and others to help make this possible. With their cooperation, BASF is able to sustain an active R&D pipeline, an innovative portfolio of products and services, and teams of experts in the lab and in the field to support customers in making their businesses succeed. In 2016, BASF’s Crop Protection division generated sales of €5.6 billion. For more information, please visit us at www.agriculture.basf.com or on any of our social media channels.

About BASF

BASF Corporation, headquartered in Florham Park, New Jersey, is the North American affiliate of BASF SE, Ludwigshafen, Germany. BASF has more than 17,500 employees in North America, and had sales of $16.2 billion in 2016. For more information about BASF’s North American operations, visit www.basf.us. BASF combines economic success with environmental protection and social responsibility. The approximately 114,000 employees in the BASF Group work on contributing to the success of our customers in nearly all sectors and almost every country in the world. Our portfolio is organized into five segments: Chemicals, Performance Products, Functional Materials & Solutions, Agricultural Solutions and Oil & Gas. BASF generated sales of about €58 billion in 2016. BASF shares are traded on the stock exchanges in Frankfurt (BAS), London (BFA) and Zurich (BAS). Further information at www.basf.com.

Photos by Kathy F. Atkinson, Shannon Modla and Venkatachalam Lakshmanan


UD study looks at how light pollution lures birds into urban areas during fall migration

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On their fall migration south in the Northern Hemisphere, scores of birds are being lured by artificial light pollution into urban areas that may be an ecological trap, according to the University of Delaware’s Jeff Buler.

Buler, associate professor in UD’s Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology, and his research team used 16 weather surveillance radars from the northeastern United States over a seven-year period to map the distributions of migratory birds during their fall stopovers. The research is published in the scientific journal Ecology Letters.

Since most of the birds that migrate in the U.S. are nocturnal and leave their stopover sites at night, Buler and his research group took snapshots of the birds as they departed.

“Shortly after sunset, at around civil twilight, they all take off in these well-synchronized flights that show up as a sudden bloom of reflectivity on the radar,” Buler said. “We take a snapshot of that, which allows us to map out where they were on the ground and at what densities. It basically gives us a picture of their distributions on the ground.”

The researchers were interested in seeing what factors shape the birds’ distributions and why they occur in certain areas.

UD study looks at how light pollution lures birds into urban areas during fall migration“We think artificial light might be a mechanism of attraction because we know at a very small scale, birds are attracted to light,” Buler said. “Much like insects are drawn to a streetlight at night, birds are also drawn to places like lighthouses. Especially when visibility is poor, you can get these big fall-outs at lighthouses and sports complexes. Stadiums will have birds land in the stadium if it’s foggy at night and the lights are on.”

One hazard for birds attracted to city lights is death from flying into high buildings. Buler said that some cities such as Toronto have even gone so far as to institute ‘Lights Out’ programs, turning off the lights in tall buildings to deter birds from colliding with them.

Sky Glow

The research team analyzed the distributions of the birds in proximity to the brightest areas in the northeast such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

“These are super-bright, large metropolitan areas,” Buler said. “We found an increasing density of birds the closer you get to these cities. The effect goes out about 200 kilometers [about 125 miles]. We estimate that these flying birds can see a city on the horizon up to several hundred kilometers away. Essentially, there is no place in the northeastern United States where they can’t see the sky glow of a city.”

Parks and Yards

The researchers also found that suburban areas, such as people’s backyards and city parks, such as Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, harbor some of the highest densities of birds in the northeast.

“Fairmount Park has higher densities of birds than at Cape May, New Jersey, which is where birders typically go to see birds concentrating during migration,” Buler said.

When they do get lured into cities, the birds seek out suitable habitat, which can cause concerns from a conservation standpoint as lots of birds pack into a small area with limited resources and higher mortality risks.

“One of the things we point out in this paper is that there might be negative consequences for birds being drawn to urban cities. We know there’s risk of collision with buildings, collision with vehicles, and getting eaten by cats, which are a major predator,” Buler said.

“Domestic cats could be the largest anthropogenic source of mortality for birds. If birds are being drawn into these heavily developed areas, it may be increasing their risk of mortality from anthropogenic sources and it may also be that the resources in those habitats are going to be depleted much faster because of competition with other birds.”

Another concern: light pollution created in these cities has been increasing in recent years with the advent of LED lights, which are much brighter than the incandescent lights they replaced.

“The transition of street lighting from incandescent to LED continues to increase the amount of light pollution,” Buler said. “If you think about it from an evolutionary sense, for all wildlife really, mammals and insects and birds, they’ve only been exposed to this light pollution for less than 200 years. They’re still adapting to the light.”

Article by Adam Thomas

Photo by Doug Tallamy

Video by Jeff Chase

This video can also be viewed on UDaily.

UD holds sixth annual Microbial Systems Symposium

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Much like the microbes they study in the world—which can be found anywhere from oceans to human skin cells—microbial researchers are spread out pretty much everywhere at the University of Delaware.

Because of this, the Microbial Systems Symposium plays an integral role in bringing together the microbial scientific community at UD to keep researchers up to date on the latest findings, techniques and tools available at the University.

This year’s symposium was held on Saturday, Feb. 10 in Townsend Hall.

Robin Morgan, interim provost, said that the event is a great way for faculty, graduate students and others to learn about the recent advances in microbiology at UD.

UD holds 6th annual Microbial Systems Symposium“The day-long event catalyzes collaborations and helps groups invested in microbiology appreciate the depth and breadth of efforts all across the UD campus. An added plus is that students gain valuable experience in presenting short talks and posters,” Morgan said.

Jennifer Biddle, associate professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment (CEOE), said the symposium is a great way to advance new research collaborations.

“Every year through this symposium we come together to see what other people are doing, share expertise and cultivate a community of microbiologists,” Biddle said. “Microbes are everywhere. Because there’s a very large clinical and applied aspect as well as an ecological aspect, you naturally fall into different places. We’re spread out across all these different disciplines and yet we’re asking very similar questions and using, more importantly, similar techniques.”

Biddle co-organized this year’s symposium with Amy Biddle, assistant professor in the Department of Animal and Food Sciences.

The symposium included a keynote speaker from the region, Elizabeth Grice, assistant professor in the Department of Dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania. Derrick Scott, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Delaware State University, also presented.

“We’re getting bigger and we’re trying to make this more regional with this idea that the methodologies are all shared and we’re all within a few hours of each other,” Jennifer Biddle said.

Poster presentations

Undergraduate and graduate students had a chance to present their research to those in attendance during a morning and afternoon poster session.

Cassandra Harris, a master’s level student in marine studies, is studying fish gut microbes. She’s looking at the differences between an herbivore (plant eater), a carnivore (meat eater) and an invertivore (eater of crabs, etc.) and how changes to their diets also change the gut microbiome.

The herbivores she is studying are Yellow Tangs, the invertivores are Lagoon Triggerfish and the carnivores are Dwarf Hawkfish.

Harris said that fish give off specific chemical cues with regards to their scent based on what they eat which aides in predator avoidance in prey fish.

“We are manipulating the diets of the herbivore and the invertivore to that of a carnivore and seeing how their chemical cue changes,” Harris said.

After running trials, Harris said that the researchers saw that the cues of the herbivore and invertivore changed to that of a carnivore because prey fish are avoiding them even though they aren’t predators.

“We think that the gut microbes may be causing this change. Gut microbes are highly dependent on the diet of the host and the microbiome shifts when the diet is changed. The end goal is to hopefully identify the metabolism within the gut microbes that is causing the change in chemical cues given off by the fish,” said Harris.

As an undergraduate, Harris worked with behaviors in the common bottlenose dolphin and wanted to try something different as a graduate student.

With Biddle as her advisor, Harris got interested in gut microbes.

“They’re not the most glamorous but I like the techniques I’m learning with bioinformatics and so that’s the real draw,” Harris said.

Lingyi Wu, a doctoral student in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources (CANR) who works in the lab of Eric Wommack, deputy dean of CANR, talked about her research that focuses on viruses of microbes, specifically looking at a hypothetical device that would allow for a more time efficient, low-cost way to study these viruses.

“We have tons of viruses in the ocean and most of the viruses use bacteria as their host but the viruses are very small. We can’t just grab them and study them,” Wu said. “Usually, we observe the viruses under a microscope but it is very small if you want to see how they behave and it is time consuming and expensive to get a fancy microscope. We propose to build a microfluidic device and to put all of your bacteria and viruses into it.”

Award winners included:

Best student talks: Nathan MacDonald, who works in the Fidelma Boyd lab, Delicious but Dangerous: Unique sugars biosynthesized by bacteria; Kaliopi Bousses, a master’s level student in CEOE who works in the Jennifer Biddle lab, Microbial succession in a sulfur-oxidizing mat; and Michael Pavia, a master’s level student in the College of Arts and Sciences who works in the lab of Clara Chan, associate professor in CEOE, Colonization and S(0) Mineralization of Sulfur Oxidizing Biofilms in the Frasassi Cave System.

Best poster presentations: Amelia Harrison, a master’s level student in CEOE working with Wommack, Ribonucleotide reductase provides insight into marine virioplankton communities; Rebecca Vandzura, a master’s level student in CEOE who is working with Chan, Bacteriophage roles in hydrothermal vent iron mats: a metagenomic analysis; and Cassandra Harris, who is working with Jennifer Biddle, Identifying Hindgut Microbes in Ctenochaetus striatus and Calotomus spinidens: Comparing Community Composition, Function, and Identifying Genomes Through Metagenomics.

Support for the symposium was provided by the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources (Department of Plant and Soil Sciences and Animal and Food Sciences), the College of Arts and Sciences (Department of Biology), the College of Earth, Ocean and Environment, the College of Engineering (Departments of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering) and the Delaware Environmental Institute (DENIN). Betty Cowgill, academic support coordinator in the Department of Biological Sciences and Grace Wisser, CANR event coordinator, both assisted in putting together the event.

Article and photo by Adam Thomas

This article can also be viewed on UDaily.

CANR 2018 Research Symposium set for Monday, April 30

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The 2018 College of Agriculture and Natural Resources Research Symposium will be held from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday, April 30 in a large tent behind Townsend Hall.

All CANR researchers, including undergraduate and graduate students, post-docs, staff and faculty are welcome to participate in the third annual symposium.

The 2018 CANR Research Symposium will be held Monday, April 30Participants will enjoy outstanding intellectual stimulation and lunch with colleagues and may present new posters or posters recently presented at a scientific meeting.

Awards will be given to the top presenters in undergraduate, graduate, doctoral and post-doc categories and all those will receive monetary awards.

To register for the symposium, complete the registration form here.

The deadline to register is Friday, April 6.

UD researchers investigate population of black ducks in coastal North Carolina

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For one of the first times at a large scale, University of Delaware researchers are studying breeding black duck populations in coastal North Carolina to determine nesting site preference and hatching success. This will better inform conservation practices in the area.

The researchers are also looking at the implications of sea level rise that directly correlate with the salt marsh, which is where the black ducks mostly nest.

The research is being led at UD by Chris Williams, professor in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, and Daniel Lawson, a master’s level student in Williams’ lab. Funding was provided by the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission (NCWRC).

The population of black ducks has been declining since 1955 and is now just starting to stabilize. Williams attributed this stabilization in part to the formation of government funded joint ventures that brought people together across state boundaries to help with conservation goals.

UD researchers investigate population of black ducks in coastal North CarolinaOne of those joint ventures was the Black Duck Joint Venture, which was created in the 1980s when a nationwide management plan for all waterfowl species was established.

“We’ve been doing a great deal of research on mid-Atlantic wintering black ducks ecology for the last decade,” Williams said. “However, there is a new focus by the federal government to better research limitations to their breeding ecology. While the majority of black ducks nest up north in places like Quebec in forested wetlands, there is also a smaller population that breeds along the Mid-Atlantic coast.”

North Carolina is the southernmost extent of the black duck’s breeding area.

“In recent years, North Carolina started breeding season helicopter surveys to quantify how many black ducks stayed in the area to nest,” Williams said. “But they had no idea the microhabitat choices by these birds to nest and they didn’t know how successful they were.”

Nest searches

Lawson said that the researchers travelled to North Carolina from March through the end of June last year and conducted nest searches.

“Within the Carolina brackish marshes, there are areas of slightly higher ground close to the marsh perimeter,” Lawson said. “It is here where the marsh borders the back bays, that we’ve found a little over half the nests. The other half we found on dredge spoil islands within the Pamlico and Roanoke Sounds.”

In order to find the nests, they would drag a rope with cans attached to it across the top of the vegetation they were searching.

“We were literally dragging thousands of acres of marsh and when we got close enough, the hen would pop up off the nest,” said Lawson. “Once we found the nests, we would monitor them. Part of the monitoring included trail cameras, which we wanted to have on some of the nests to solidify what caused the nest successes or failures.”

Along with trail cameras, one of the other monitoring practices the researchers employed was to look at the incubation stage every week to see how the eggs were progressing, counting how many eggs were in a clutch and taking other metrics like egg length and width.

“We would follow the nests until they either hatched, were abandoned, or were destroyed whether it be from flooding or depredation from a predator,” said Lawson.

In addition, they also took vegetation metrics that will be used to build a habitat selection model.

Once a nest was terminated, they would take vegetation height and vegetation density to try and get an idea of where the black ducks were selecting to nest.

The main factors that led to unsuccessful nests were predators and flooding.

“One flooding event wiped out six of our seven nests that we had at the time. So that was obviously a factor and we caught it on camera,” said Lawson. “Another nest predator that we never would have suspected is the bald eagle. We caught it actually depredating a nest along with raccoons, which we kind of expected.”

They also employed a drone to try and help with the population estimates but Lawson said because the area was so large and the ducks were so hard to spot with the drone—which used heat signatures to look for the birds—that it was not as successful as they envisioned.

Next Steps

Lawson will return to North Carolina in 2018 with the ultimate hope of building a geographic information system (GIS) model to help inform conservation practices in the area to save the best habitat that the black ducks use to build their nests.

“We’re trying to find where they are building their nests and if there are characteristic patterns of vegetation. If we can see it through a GIS and if we can identify what habitat the ducks are using, and the distance to edge, then we can think about it from a sea level rise scenario,” said Williams. “We will hopefully be able to determine how much land will be lost from different sea level rise scenarios and determine the implication for future breeding black ducks. That’s the big conservation question for North Carolina. Is this a population that they need to conserve and can they conserve it?”

The researchers would also like to have a chronology of nest initiation and peak nesting dates with implications for marsh burning guidelines by the end of the research as well as see how nest success and failure in North Carolina differs from the rest of the black duck range. They are hopeful that this data can also be extrapolated to other Mid-Atlantic states.

“Most of the studies in the Mid-Atlantic and Chesapeake Bay area have found that a small percentage of black ducks choose to nest in brackish marsh habitats. The majority choose more upland sites,” said Lawson. “From our research so far in North Carolina, we are finding that a large percentage are choosing to nest in the brackish marsh. I believe these findings will help complete the breeding black duck picture and will answer future habitat conservation questions that specifically have these ducks in mind.”

Article by Adam Thomas

Photos courtesy of Daniel Lawson

Video by Jason Hinmon, Paul Puglisi, Daniel Lawson

This article can also be viewed on UDaily.

UD professor collaborates on publication focused on the importance of near-term ecological forecasting

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We rely on accurate weather forecasting every day to help us determine what to wear or how to prepare for impending storms. Weather forecasting has become such a part of our lives and so common place that knowing the current weather conditions is only a click away for most of us on our phones.

Researchers from 23 institutions, including the University of Delaware, are teaming up to see if the same can be made true of near-term ecological forecasting—forecasts that will allow researchers to map out plans for future environmental management, conservation and sustainability.

Near-term ecological forecasting plans would cover everything from seasonal wildfires across the globe to weekly national influenza estimates to daily algal blooms for specific regions, according to the researchers. They recently published their call for a decade of ecological forecasting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

UD professor collaborates on publication focused on the importance of near-term ecological forecastingRodrigo Vargas, associate professor in the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences, is a co-author of the paper, which was led by Michael Dietze, associate professor at Boston University, and included colleagues from universities, private research institutes, and the U. S. Geological Survey.

“Forecasting science has been developed for weather forecasting, which is surprisingly accurate, but in other disciplines, we are behind,” Vargas said. “So why is it not possible to increase forecasting in other areas of science, especially, in this case, ecological forecasting?”

The two main questions that drive the study are how the ecosystems and the services they provide are going to change in the future and how human decisions affect those trajectories.

“The challenge with ecological systems is you not only have the weather and the climate, you have soils, plants and animals, along with people who ultimately need to make decisions,” Vargas said. “Our decisions as a society are going to be combined with the environment to influence the trajectory of these ecosystems.”

Another problem is that most of the ecological forecasts that exist today are concerned with long-term trends, what’s going to happen 100 years from now, rather than near-term trends, such as what will happen tomorrow, within weeks or months.

“Environmental decision making requires that information,” Vargas said. “For example, if you’re the Delaware Department of Transportation, and you know that there’s going to be a snow storm tomorrow, you’re going to make management decisions that are either going to save you a lot of money or cost you a lot of money. Imagine if we can also have near-term forecasting information for ecological purposes because the same thing could be done for environmental management.”

Interoperability

With the amount of ecological data that is now able to be stored and accessed by scientists and other agencies, Vargas said that researchers can start applying different computational informatics and statistical methods to improve forecast specific theories.

There is also a need to coordinate and share technology, data, protocols and experiences through increasing interoperability which can be seen as a coordinated effort to maximize collaboration to produce knowledge and apply the knowledge gained, but there are several barriers for the scientific community to overcome.

Not only do the scientists need to coordinate what they are measuring and if they are measuring the right thing, they also have to discuss how to design a monitoring network and evaluate if they are all storing the information in the same way using similar instruments.

There are also organizational barriers, such as what agency or organization is going to measure and gather particular pieces of data, as well as cultural differences between social scientists and data scientists.

“For interoperability, it is about how can we work together and closely as human beings with our strengths and weaknesses to increase knowledge,” Vargas said.

The researchers also point to the need for near real-time data that shows up quickly in databases or data portals after being collected, in order to properly improve near-term ecological forecasting.

“Data accessibility has been improved for weather forecasting and meteorological stations,” Vargas said. “In the Delaware Environmental Observing System (DEOS) there is a minimum delay for data to be accessible in their website. But for the diverse array of ecological forecasting, that issue of data availability and accessibility is big because we’re not there yet.”

The data collected would be made as publicly available as possible and secured for long-term storage.

Next Steps

Moving forward, the researchers said that they would like to focus on three key topics: training, institutions and culture.

“It is important to train the next generation of ecological forecasters because this new generation will require skills that are currently not taught at most institutions,” Vargas said. “Forecasting can benefit towards researchers being trained in statistics, best practices of data, coding and informatics. I think the timing is interesting for UD where the Data Science initiative can catalyze new collaborations, visions and educational programs and open the opportunity for students to acquire skills that currently might not be there.”

Cross institutional fellowship programs where students can benefit from networking opportunities and interdisciplinary training programs will also play key roles in improving ecological forecasting.

“Ecological forecasters are not going to be just ecologists, are not just going to be data scientists, are not just going to be computer scientists or statisticians, it will require a combination of different skills,” Vargas said. “.The paper also calls for short courses maybe over one to two week periods to obtain specific skills.”

As for when the best time to start with this process of ecological forecasting, the researchers said that the time to start is now.

“We should start learning by doing,” Vargas said. “We will be making mistakes now but with that, we will be learning on the fly and that’s really how weather forecasting worked.”

Paper Roots

Though the paper was published this year, the process of thinking began back in 2015 when a diverse group of researchers gathered at the University of Delaware as part of the Building Global Ecological Understanding workshop to discuss ecological grand challenges including those associated with near-term ecological forecasting.

Those challenges were later the focus of the Operationalizing Ecological Forecasts workshop in Fort Collins, Colorado, which ultimately led to the publication of the paper.

The Building Global Ecological Understanding workshop held at UD was organized by Vargas and the Operationalizing Ecological Forecasts workshop was organized by Dietze.

The Building Global Ecological Understanding workshop was funded by the National Science Foundation.

The Operationalizing Ecological Forecasts workshop was hosted by the United States Geological Survey and funded by the National Ecological Observatory Network.

Article by Adam Thomas

Photo by Evan Krape

This article can also be viewed on UDaily.

UD’s Rodrigo Vargas works with NASA to map carbon dynamics across Mexico

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The University of Delaware’s Rodrigo Vargas is partnering with NASA and an international team of collaborators to understand carbon dynamics in soils and diverse landscapes in Mexico. Using one of the agency’s high-performance computers, the group will study massive amounts of datasets to document carbon dynamics across the country.

Vargas, associate professor in the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences in UD’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, is leading the three- year, $800,000 project. Vargas’ work is a continuation of a previous project that led to over 20 peer-reviewed publications and published datasets.

This new project aims to improve national carbon monitoring efforts and provide support for implementation of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation plus improving forest management, carbon stock enhancement and conservation (REDD+).

UD’s Rodrigo Vargas works with NASA to map carbon dynamics across MexicoCo-Investigator Sangram Ganguly, senior research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, has developed a machine learning approach implemented in the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) high performance computing (HPC) framework to detect forest cover change across the United States.

Now, the researchers are interested to see if this approach using high resolution aerial imagery can be applied to Mexico, which has a more heterogeneous landscape.

“Mexico is a great test bed for NASA Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) products because it provides a heterogeneous landscape for testing,” Vargas said. “That’s extremely important because in a short distance, you can have very sharp changes in climate and the land surface from deserts, tropical forests, all the way to tundra so this landscape heterogeneity makes a challenge for monitoring applications.”

Vargas said the motivation behind the project is to allow NASA to develop and improve capabilities to support stakeholders — such as the U.S. Forest Service, the National Forestry Commission of Mexico and the North American Carbon Program — to improve monitoring, reporting and verification of carbon stocks and fluxes across North America.

“This is about big data processing for training algorithms,” Vargas said. “This is about using the wealth of information to increase our capabilities for carbon monitoring systems. We want to generate a framework using different variables and then, through collaboration with stakeholders, improve national carbon monitoring.”

The researchers are collecting datasets from Mexico to create harmonized information that will allow them to study terrestrial carbon dynamics from local to regional levels. This will be important to test and improve the applicability of NASA CMS products elsewhere other than the United States.

“The data that is available in the United States is unique but Mexico is a country that has developed a lot of important and useful datasets that can now be used to test the U.S. derived technologies,” Vargas said. “Also because of the proximity of Mexico to the United States, some information of Mexico is covered by satellites of the United States because of the shared border. So many of the products that are designed for the U.S. can be independently tested in Mexico.”

By using remote sensing and ground information coupled with a HPC framework, the researchers are hoping to not only increase the knowledge in carbon cycle science but also reduce the costs associated with national-scale carbon monitoring.

“One step is to extract information and knowledge from remote sensing products, airborne platforms and intensive carbon monitoring sites to provide multi-scale benefits and knowledge on carbon cycle science,” Vargas said. “If you go and assign an inventory and say ‘I’m going to measure all the trees around the country,’ it could be very accurate but it’s super expensive. If you use a remote sensing approach, just by itself, it’s cheap but we need to test how accurate it could be.”

By extracting knowledge from intensive ground-based inventories of carbon stocks and fluxes to inform different approaches, the researchers are hoping to identify uncertainties to provide confidence in remote sensing products.

“What we’re trying to do in Mexico, is we have a lot of information for the inventories but also we have a lot of information from remote sensing. We want to put them together so we can maximize the efforts,” said Vargas.

The group will take advantage of available databases from Mexico and the United States on soil carbon and models of carbon fluxes across the countries which allows them to propose a methodology for forest classifications with regards to forest cover change assessments and an estimation of carbon related variables.

“We’re implementing techniques for land surface classification developed within the United States using HPC to test them to see how they perform in complex, heterogeneous landscapes in Mexico using new data sets,” Vargas said. “This is important to test but also to generate knowledge and inform stakeholders in Mexico to ultimately close the regional carbon balance across North America.”

Once the researchers provide a framework and their calculations, the outputs can be tested on the ground in collaborations with Mexican scientists for ground truth validation at intensive carbon monitoring sites.

“This builds on the goal of NASA CMS to build these prototypes to support monitoring, reporting and verification of carbon stocks and fluxes at different spatial and temporal scales,” said Vargas. “It brings the opportunity for UD to build international collaborations and build international reputation and it’s important for closing the regional carbon budget of North America.”

Vargas said that the project lines up nicely with UD’s new data science initiative and he has also been collaborating with researchers from multiple institutions to look at ecological data to help improve near-term ecological forecasting.

CANR holds 2018 Research Symposium

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The University of Delaware’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources (CANR) held its third annual Research Symposium on Monday, April 30 from 9 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. in an Ag Day tent outside of Townsend Hall.

This year’s symposium included 76 poster presentations—up from 50 in 2017—from undergraduates, graduate students, post-doctoral researchers and CANR staff members and was split up into five areas of unique research strengths for the college:

  • One Health—intersections among animal, plant, human and ecosystem health;
  • Climate Change—impacts, mitigation and adaptation;
  • Genetics and genomics for plant, animal and ecosystem improvement;
  • Human Dimensions of food, agriculture and natural resources; and
  • Sustainable food systems, landscapes and ecosystems

CANR holds 2018 Research SymposiumEric Wommack, deputy dean and associate dean for research and graduate education at CANR, said that this year’s symposium was a great success.

“We made a big jump this year in presentations from 44 in 2016, to 50 in 2017, to 76 today. The breadth and impact of the work presented was impressive. It clearly demonstrates the global impact of the College’s research enterprise and that we are succeeding in delivering on UD’s land grant mission to serve the public good through scientific research,” said Wommack.

Winners were announced in PhD, MS, Undergraduate and Post-doc categories as well as top poster winners in each of the five CANR unique research strength areas.

The PhD winners included:

  • Adam Stager: Phenotyping on the move: Georeferenced imaging and sensing in UD’s outdoor plant science laboratories for advances in agriculture; and
  • Alma Vazquez-Lule: Carbon fluxes and phenology changes in a Delaware tidal salt marsh

The MS winners included:

  • Ying Peng: Evaluation of estrogenic activity of the novel Bisphenol-A alternatives by in-vitro bioassays; and
  • Susan Gachara: Synthetic biology for plant viral diagnostics: Application to Maize Lethal Necrosis disease

The Undergraduate winner was Dominique Lester: To bean or not to bean: Downy Mildew is the question.

The Post-doc winner was Matt Limmer: Quantitative synchrotron x-ray fluorescence for trace metal(loid) distribution in rice grains.

CANR holds 2018 Research SymposiumThe five unique strength winners included:

  • Justin Blair: Capture mechanisms of Duddingtonia flagrans on cyathostomin larvae; in the unique strength group: “One Health” – intersections among animal, plant, human and ecosystem health;
  • Branimir Trifunovic: Greenhouse gas dynamics in a salt marsh creek; in the unique strength group: Climate Change – impacts, mitigation and adaptation;
  • Imogene Cancellare: Snow leopard genetics across high Asia; in the unique strength group: Genetics and genomics for plant, animal and ecosystem improvement;
  • Sean Ellis: A neuroeconomic investigation of disgust in food purchasing decisions; in the unique strength group: Human Dimensions of food, agriculture and natural resources; and
  • Hannah Clipp: Food availability determines how migrating birds use stopover sites; in the unique strength group: Sustainable food systems, landscapes and ecosystems

Article by Adam Thomas

Photos by Monica Moriak


UD doctoral student co-authors guide on Mexico’s Mangrove forests

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Mangrove forests cover just 0.1 percent of the earth’s surface and yet they are seventy percent more productive than most terrestrial ecosystems.

In Mexico, specifically, mangroves cover 775,555 hectres. Their ability to offer ecosystem services such as sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide into “blue carbon”—carbon stored in coastal ecosystems—working as nurseries for many commercial species of fish and preventing flooding and erosion events in coastal areas make them an invaluable environmental resource.

However, when it comes to uniformly studying mangrove forests, they present multiple challenges to researchers looking to coordinate their efforts at local, regional, national and international scales.

Alma and Rodrigo Vargas discussing mangrove forestsMangroves have a high rate of structural variability—meaning that it is possible to find one mangrove growing taller than 30 meters in one location and find the same species of mangrove growing less than one meter in height in a different location, mainly as consequence of different environmental conditions.

Because of this, the University of Delaware’s Alma Vazquez-Lule, in collaboration with researchers from academic, governmental and non-profit institutions, put together a guide to standardize the methods to monitor mangroves in Mexico at different scales, with the idea to generate data available for regional, national and international mangrove synthesis studies.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) collaborated with four Mexican institutions including the National Commission for Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO), Mexican Forest Service (CONAFOR), ProNatura and the Mexican Fund for the Conservation of Nature (FMCN).CONABIOin Mexico was the main institution that coordinated the effort for the guide.

“The guide includes different laboratory and fieldwork methods to characterize the forest structure of mangroves and to identify environmental variables that can help to explain and understand the high structural diversity of this ecosystem in Mexico,” said Vazquez-Lule, a doctoral student studying with Rodrigo Vargas, associate professor in the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences in UD’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

The guide is geared towards everyone from mangroves experts, to students, technicians and stakeholders to identify the minimum requirements for mangrove monitoring projects.

“Because this guide is in Spanish, it also can be used for other Spanish speaking countries with mangroves in the rest of the Americas,” said Vazquez-Lule, which is important because Mangroves are distributed in the tropical and subtropical areas of the world, between the 30° N and 40° S latitudes that include many Spanish speaking countries.

Alma Vazquez-Lule and Rodrigo Vargas pose with book about Mangrove forests in MexicoThe guide is divided into 8 chapters with each chapter following an order considering the implementation of a mangroves characterization project or mangrove monitoring project.

In addition to writing the introduction, Vazquez-Lule also co-authored chapter 8 with Vargas which focuses on potential studies of synthesis in the mangroves of Mexico with the idea to explain the mangroves ecological processes at different spatial scales.

“The chapter was done to direct actions for a better understanding of mangroves ecosystem processes in Mexico through the synthesis and integration of mangrove data collected at different scales,” said Vazquez-Lule.

Vargas said that he was thrilled to have Vazquez-Lule co-author such a high-profile guide that could have international implications.

“I think that’s extremely important to recognize that she is a collaborator for the leadership of this guide and I think it’s important for the need for standardization because not every mangrove forest is the same and the techniques that can be applied in one country may not be relevant for the specific characteristics of the mangroves of a different country. That is why it’s important to have these efforts and document them, to improve the inventories for educational purposes, technical accuracy, replicability, reproducibility, standardization and harmonization,” said Vargas.

Blue carbon has been a priority for Vargas’ lab as he received a prestigious National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development award to study blue carbon at the St. Jones Reserve in Delaware.

Vargas is also involved in a NASA project that stresses the importance of sharing data across institutions, countries and agencies to map carbon dynamics throughout Mexico.

Article by Adam Thomas

Photo by Monica Moriak

New study uses weather radar technology to identify important stopover sites for migratory birds

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Every fall, dozens of species of landbirds migrate from their summer breeding grounds in the United States and Canada to wintering grounds as far away as South America.

The migration period is one of the most perilous stages in the life cycle for birds, and the widespread loss of stopover habitat is believed to be a contributing factor in the decline in populations for a number of migratory bird species.

The first step to protecting important stopover sites for birds is to figure out where they are located, and a new study led by researchers at the University of Delaware and funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and partners uses weather radar technology to identify key stopover sites where birds can rest and refuel, and changing patterns in bird migration.

The Northeast Migratory Landbird Stopover Report provides a regional perspective on important sites across multiple states in the Eastern United States.

New study uses weather radar technology to identify important stopover sites for migratory birds“In the Northeast, nothing provides more comprehensive coverage of the land surface than radar,” said Jeff Buler, associate professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Delaware who led the study. “It detects birds over more than a third of the land area in the Northeast.”

Buler and his colleagues analyzed seven years of weather surveillance radar data to predict potentially important stopover sites for migratory landbirds in the region, and conducted surveys for two fall seasons at 48 sites in the Delmarva peninsula and mainland Virginia to corroborate their findings.

“We wanted to know: What are birds doing during stopovers, and why are they choosing certain sites over others?” Buler said.

Using accompanying maps with the radar data can help managers and agencies identify and conserve places heavily used by migrating birds — including protected areas and places that are not managed with migratory species in mind, such as urban parks.

“Before using this radar technology, we didn’t have such a comprehensive perspective on migration stopover for the entire region,” said Randy Dettmers, landbird biologist for the FWS Division of Migratory Birds. “We can use this information to target conservation efforts for management and protection of stopover habitat where it will have the greatest benefit to birds — including urban parks where forest and shrub habitats serve as important refueling sites for migrating birds attracted to brightly lit areas.”

Research Results

The researchers found that migratory birds favor landscapes with a greater amount of hardwood forest cover, but also have a clear preference for hardwood forest patches within more developed landscapes.

Bird density was positively related to the density of arthropods—insects and spiders—and the abundance of fruit, which provide critical food sources for birds looking to refuel during stopovers.

For migratory birds, artificial light is never out of sight — birds flying at about 500 meters above the ground can always detect the sky glow of some large city on the horizon — and it appears to be attractive. The results show that migrant bird density increased with proximity to the brightest areas.

The highest bird densities were found in coastal areas. When southbound landbirds encounter the Atlantic coast, many follow it south rather than migrating over the open Atlantic Ocean. Across the landscape, migrant stopover was most concentrated in woods around brightly lit areas near the Atlantic coast.

The average trend across all radars was a decline of 4.2 percent per year in bird density, which equates to a 29 percent total decline from the period of 2008-2014. Declines were particularly noticeable in Virginia, Massachusetts, and Maine.

Translating results to action

The combination of the regional radar data and the survey data equips people involved in conservation at any scale to identify important stopover sites and make management decisions that reflect the needs of specific species, such as ground foragers that feed on insects in the leaf litter.

While the maps are useful for informing management strategies on protected lands — about half of the National Wildlife Refuges in the region show up on the radar – Buler said the data can help identify new priorities as well.

“We can see many places with heavy use by migratory birds that are not yet protected,” he said.

When Gwen Brewer of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR) looked at the study results, she said, “The Pocomoke River corridor on the Eastern shore just lit up like crazy as a migratory hotspot.”

The DNR provided funding to help ground truth the radar data in coastal Maryland and the Delmarva Peninsula through the Resource Assessment Service Power Plant Research Program.

Brewer, who is the science program manager for the Wildlife and Heritage Service, said the study can direct her agency to other priority areas where they can use fine-scale data to narrow in on the forest patches that offer the greatest value to migratory birds.

“By showing us what stands out as important in Maryland, the study also helps us understand what our role should be in the big conservation picture,” she said. “It helps us think about the responsibility we have as part of the larger landscape, and that can inform our in-state process for acquisition, easements, and grant proposals.”

The full Northeast Migratory Landbird Stopover report, maps and data depicting predicted bird density during fall migration, and a user’s guide for these maps are now available in the Northeast Stopover Sites for Migratory Landbirds gallery on DataBasin.

This article was originally published by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Photo by Hannah Clipp

UD research shows beachgoers negatively impacted by offshore oil platforms

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Every year, visitors flock to Delaware’s beaches for an opportunity to relax, soak up the sun and take a dip in the ocean.

But if offshore energy platforms—especially oil rigs—were installed off the Delaware coastline, many of those visitors would move their beach blankets elsewhere, according to University of Delaware research.

Forty percent of beachgoers responding to a UD survey that was administered in 2012 said their vacation experience would be negatively impacted, and 16 percent indicated they simply would not visit the beach with oil platforms looming offshore.

The research was led by Jacob Fooks, who was a doctoral student in economics at UD when the research was conducted, and Kent Messer, the Unidel Howard Cosgrove Chair for the Environment in UD’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources (CANR).

Josh Duke, professor in the Department of Applied Economics and Statistics, and George Parsons, professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment, are also authors on the paper which was published recently in the journal Energy Policy.

UD research shows beachgoers negatively impacted by offshore oil platformsMesser said the results from the study should worry the leaders of beach communities who may be considering these offshore energy sources because they could experience a drop off of 10 to 15 percent of their visitors.

“Can the beach communities lose 15 percent of their tourists?,” Messer said. “These people will go elsewhere and another 25 percent of the group is going to come and not really enjoy their visit as much. That’s a big impact.”

The research was conducted at Rehoboth Beach and Cape Henlopen from July 12–15 and July 29–August 1 in 2012.

A total of 525 people participated in the research by completing either a short survey about their opinions regarding a series of images of oil platforms and wind turbines offshore at various distances or by taking a more in-depth, longer survey using computer simulations that presented images of oil platforms or wind turbines on the horizon at varying distances.

In both surveys, participants were shown oil platforms and wind turbines at different distances and asked if those structures would have enhanced, detracted or made no difference to their beach experiences.

Around 60 percent of those who took the short survey indicated that oil platforms would detract from their beach experience, compared with 25 percent for the wind turbines.

Those who took the longer survey were able to select a starting location for the energy platforms.

“Even at ten miles out, which was the farthest the participants could place the oil platforms, many of the respondents would not visit the Delaware beaches at this distance—even though they wouldn’t be able to see the platforms,” Messer said. “Participants were clearly concerned about the oil spills that could affect the beaches. In contrast, people were more comfortable with having wind turbines closer to the shore.”

In January 2018, the Trump Administration announced a new five-year drilling plan that could open new areas along both U.S. coasts. Messer said that it is important for coastal communities to realize the negative view many of their visitors have for offshore oil drilling structures.

“Our research shows that beach visitors do not like these oil platforms and believe they would detract from their experience,” Messer said. “A bunch of people said they wouldn’t come to the Delaware beaches because of the presence of offshore oil platforms and a bunch of people indicated a negative sentiment, basically saying, ‘I will still come to the beach but you’ve taken a bunch of the fun out of it.’ This negative sentiment is important from a consumer welfare perspective. If you go somewhere and you don’t like it, that’s a real loss to society.”

The research work was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).

Article by Adam Thomas

Photo by iStock

This article can also be viewed on UDaily.

UD Cooperative Extension coordinates statewide insect trapping program to benefit growers

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Since the early 1970s, the University of Delaware’s Cooperative Extension Integrated Pest Management (IPM) program has coordinated a statewide insect trapping program—which includes black light traps and pheromone traps—to helps growers and industry professionals track seasonal occurrences of pests that might affect their crops, as well as let them know the best times to apply insecticides.

The program also helps academic professionals, as information gathered from the program was used in a recent study led by the University of Maryland and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrating regional pest suppression.

The black light traps use ultraviolet light to attract insects that are usually active at night. Pheromones are chemical substances usually produced by animals and they can be used to lure insects to a trap.

UD Cooperative Extension coordinates statewide insect trapping program to benefit growersSince the program began, traps have been located on cooperating growers’ farms throughout the state. In the early days, 25 black light traps were serviced by grower cooperators and collections were sent to the University where a technician hired by UD’s IPM program would identify key moth species.

Starting in late 1980s, trap monitoring shifted to a seasonal IPM employee who sent the trapping information electronically to IPM personnel. Today, that information is placed on the IPM website.

Joanne Whalen, a retired IPM specialist who joined Cooperative Extension in 1979 and became the IPM coordinator in 1983, instituted this change to ensure that trap catch information was received by growers in a timely manner.

In addition to the IPM website, Whalen sent the information to Penn State’s PestWatch website to share the information regionally. During her time as IPM specialist, she also used the information to develop articles for a statewide Weekly Crop Update newsletter.

In 2017, a pilot trapping program was initiated to train growers and consultants on how to monitor their own traps. Participants identified moths and reported moth catches to the IPM program to post on the IPM website. Currently, 14 black light and 13 pheromone traps are checked two times a week from April through September.

In the early days of the trapping program, black light traps, which attract a variety of insects, were used to monitor for black cutworm, true armyworm, corn earworm and European corn borer.

Since the late 1980s, the focus of the program shifted to monitoring primarily corn earworm and European corn borer. In recent years, the black light traps have also been used to monitor stink bug species, both the green and brown native species and the invasive brown marmorated stink bugs.

Currently, pheromone traps are used for corn earworm and emit a specific pheromone that attracts corn earworm moths. Other pheromone traps that have been part of the trapping network in the past have included black cutworm, European corn borer and Western bean cutworm, which will be added to the network again in 2018.

Bill Cissel, the IPM extension agent, said that extension personnel, as well as an hourly wage employee, monitor the traps twice a week and continue to post the results to the UD Extension Insect Trapping Program website.

They are also exploring ways to share trap catch data nationally by including it in the Integrated Pest Information Platform for Extension and Education (iPiPE) and with PestWatch, operated by Penn State University.

“Growers, crop consultants, agribusiness personnel, processing vegetable industry fieldmen and researchers use the trap catch results when making pest management decisions on sweet corn, peppers and green beans,” said Cissel. “Based on pest pressure, measured by the number of moths captured per night and using an IPM approach, they adjust insecticide spray schedules. If we capture a lot of moths, we know that ultimately, we will have a lot of caterpillars and spray intervals may need to be shortened. On the other hand, if pressure is low, then they can stretch that interval out.”

After hearing interest from growers, consultants and industry fieldmen in having historical data on the website, the IPM team worked on adding insect trapping data going back to 1982.

Pheromone trap located at the Carvel Research and Education Center.

“Their interest in using it was to say ‘Ok, I want to compare this year to a year that I recall as being really bad for corn earworms—an outbreak year—and see how we rank this year compared to then.’ With the help of our IT folks, we created an online interactive graph to visually display historical data,” said Cissel.

Greg Keane, database administrator for UD’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources (CANR), and Christy Mannering, communications specialist in CANR, helped in the creation of the website and historical interactive graphs.

“You can access the graphs from the current trap catch page on our IPM website by clicking on the historical trap catch data link. Then you can select a trapping location and insect pest to graph. The graph is created based on your selections, displaying current and historical trap catch data. I enter the trap catch data using an online form that is linked to the database and automatically updates the graphs,” said Cissel.

Program origins

Whalen said that the program was begun in the mid 1970s by the first IPM coordinator, Mark Graustein. He used the trap catch information to provide growers and processors in his pilot IPM programs with information to make decisions on when to spray for certain pests. He and entomologists in the region developed the first decision-making systems for insect management using trap catches for peppers and green beans.

“Before I arrived in Delaware in 1979, the main focus was on the processing vegetables industry, specifically green beans and peppers, and how could they could use trap catches, particularly for the management of European corn borer,” said Whalen. “From 1979 until I retired in 2016, we developed an IPM program that used trap catches to make spray decisions as part of an IPM program for sweet corn, green beans and peppers. We have a long history of using IPM and making spray decision based on trap catches for these vegetable crops because once the caterpillar gets in the fruit the damage is already done.”

In addition to providing growers with decision-making information on the need for and timing of insecticide treatments, the IPM trapping program has historically alerted them to potential outbreak of migratory pests and allowed them access to historical pieces of information that gives a sense of the population dynamics of local pests.

Whalen said that the program would not be possible if it weren’t for the cooperation with the local growers and their willingness to allow the traps on their property.

“They did it for the sake of having information they could use on their farms as well as for farmers as a whole,” Whalen said. “They were really committed to getting this information and making sure all growers had access to the information. You can see people from the very beginning felt like knowing what was happening with insect populations in our state was really important.”

Article by Adam Thomas

Photos by Michele Walfred

This story can also be viewed on UDaily.

UD scientists examine how plants protect themselves by emitting scent cues for birds

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When plants are in distress or being fed on by insects, they have been known to send out sensory volatile cues that alert organisms in the area — such as birds — that they are in need of help. While research has shown that this occurs in ecosystems such as forests, until now, this phenomenon has never been demonstrated in an agricultural setting.

Researchers at the University of Delaware have recently found that agricultural plants also send out these signals when under duress from insects, opening new potential avenues for growers to defend their crops while at the same time providing a much-needed food source for birds.

Ivan Hiltpold and Greg Shriver led the research at UD and used an unorthodox method to create their ‘larvae’ for the study: a little bit of Play-Doh and orange colored pins.

UD scientists examine how plants protect themselves by emitting scent cues for birdsUsing a field plot of maize on UD’s Newark farm, the researchers attached dispensers using a synthetic odor blend that replicated the volatiles—odor cues given off by plants to indicate they are being attacked such as the smell of freshly cut grass—attached to corn stalks. They also used dispensers using only an organic solvent as a control measure.

The Play-Doh larvae with orange head pins were then distributed on plants around the volatile dispensers and the organic solvent dispensers with the researchers measuring the bird attacks or pecks on the larvae.

They found that the imitation larvae located closer to the volatile dispensers had significantly more attacks than those located closer to the organic solvent dispensers.

The results of their study were recently published in the Journal of Chemical Ecology.

Hiltpold said the results support growing evidence that foraging birds exploit volatile cues and a more accurate understanding of their behavior will be critical when implementing pest management programs benefiting from ecological services provided by insectivorous birds.

UD scientists examine how plants protect themselves by emitting scent cues for birds“Improving our understanding of how birds prey on insects would open new avenues in sustainable pest control,” said Hiltpold.

While it has been proven for years that parasitoid insects or predatory insects respond to volatiles released by damaged plants and it has also been demonstrated that birds react to tree volatiles after insect herbivory on a tree in a forest setting, Hiltpold, assistant professor in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology, said that this is the first time field research has been conducted on volatiles in an agricultural setting.

“It is a cry for help,” said Hiltpold. “The plant is damaged, the plant emits something that recruits help and we’re all thinking it’s help from other insects but it seems that birds are also using that as a cue to locate a plant or a group of plants. Then what we think is that they use their visual equity to locate the larvae when they’re in the vicinity of the plant emitting the volatiles.”

Hiltpold said that their research in the field confirmed this, as they had one larvae located on a volatile dispenser on a plant, and then four larvae distributed on all the plants around the plant with the dispenser.

UD scientists examine how plants protect themselves by emitting scent cues for birdsWhen they compared the number of pecks to the larvae on the plant with the dispenser to the number of pecks on the larvae on plants around the dispenser, there was no significant difference.

“This means that the bird is coming, smelling the volatiles and when it gets to the vicinity of the plant that is damaged, then it visually searches for the insect,” said Hiltpold.

It is also interesting because birds have long been believed to not be able to smell, but this research indicates that they are smelling the volatiles and then coming in closer to visual locate their prey.

“Whether or not birds can smell is a big question because they apparently lack some anatomical things to smell the way other vertebrates are smelling,” Hiltpold said. “Yet, they seem to have the capability of sensing volatiles but we don’t exactly know how they do it yet.”

The next step for the researchers will involve monitoring the diversity of birds responding to these cues in agricultural, forest and wetland environments over the course of the summer.

To evaluate bird predation of fake insects, caterpillars will be visually assessed once a week. To know which birds are responding to volatiles, two time-lapse cameras will be set up per environment to collect pictures over the course of the experiment.

They were able to get the project funded by using Experiment.com to give more information about the project and raise funds.

Article by Adam Thomas

Photos by Monica Moriak

This article can also be viewed on UDaily.

UD graduate student investigates energy expenditure of ducks

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With waterfowl habitat continually changing and wetland loss occurring on a regular basis, it is imperative for researchers to see if landscapes provide enough habitat to support waterfowl populations at ideal levels.

A habitat’s carrying capacity is the number of living organisms that a region can support without environmental degradation. Researchers at the University of Delaware recently partnered with the United States Geological Survey’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center (USGS PWRC) and Ducks Unlimited (DU) to piece together a part of the carrying capacity puzzle, looking at how much energy ducks burn during a given day.

The research was led by Jake McPherson, a master’s level student in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology as well as a regional biologist for Ducks Unlimited, and Chris Williams, professor of wildlife ecology who also oversees a waterfowl and upland game bird research program in UD’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Supply and demand

McPherson said that there is a question of energy supply — how much energy a habitat is able to provide a certain number of waterfowl — and of energy demand, which is where his research comes into play.

UD graduate student investigates energy expenditure of ducks“On the energy demand side, you need to know how much energy a duck uses in a given day and you can scale that up and, for example, say, ‘One duck uses this many calories a day, and it’s going to be in this region for 60 days and we want to support 100,000 ducks’ so you can come up with a total energetic need for those birds,” said McPherson.

In order to investigate how much energy non-breeding waterfowl use in a day, past waterfowl graduate students under Williams first had to determine what specific activities make up the normal day of a duck. But after that, McPherson has come in to estimate the energy expenditure for some of those behaviors.

“It swims, flies, dives, feeds and each of those activities have different energy requirements. I’m looking at the specific energetic cost of each of those behaviors,” said McPherson.

The study used American black ducks and a lesser scaup in order to represent the two guilds of ducks: divers—ducks who dive for their food—and dabblers—those who dabble for food in shallow water or on the surface.

Using respirometry equipment for the study, McPherson put individual ducks in a sealed chamber. Whenever the duck would perform an action, whether it be swimming or diving, the respirometry machine would read the changes in oxygen and carbon dioxide levels within the chamber.

“As energetic activity increases in the chamber, that bird’s going to be consuming more oxygen than it would be if it was resting,” said McPherson. “We can use the oxygen consumption rate observed inside the chamber during that behavior to come up with an estimate of calories burned per time.”

McPherson said that while the size of the chamber can affect the accuracy of the readings, the researchers were able to develop a pyramid shaped chamber big enough that the ducks could do their normal activities without restriction but also small enough that they could get accurate readings.

In order to determine what the ducks were doing when they observed changes in the amount of oxygen in the chamber, they also videotaped the ducks during two-hour periods and cross referenced the data with the videos.

“We had to videotape these birds and time-synch the video to the respirometry output. I could look at the respirometry output and say, ‘I can see there was an increase in oxygen consumption and therefore energy expenditure in this period, let me go back and see exactly what the bird was doing during that period.’ That’s how we can correlate calories burned to a specific activity,” said McPherson.

One of the biggest challenges they faced in their research is that they were unable to observe what is perhaps the biggest energetic cost for waterfowl: flying.

“You can’t really measure flying in my set up so we said, ‘We’re going to try and get all of these other behaviors and we’ll accept that the energetic cost of flying is beyond the scope of this project,” said McPherson.

Previous study

Currently, when wildlife researchers are determining how many calories waterfowl are burning in a certain habitat, they are using numbers from a study in the 1970’s where researchers surgically implanted heart monitors onto birds in a semi-wild setting and then correlated the heart rate monitor with their observations in the field.

McPherson said that there are couple of challenges with this study, beginning with the surgically invasive implants which could affect the behavior of a wild duck.

“Certainly, it could be said of respirometry as well but surgical implants tend to be more invasive,” said McPherson. “Then, with monitoring heart rate, you can see an increase in heart rate and it wouldn’t be associated with behavior. If a predator flies over, that duck may just be sitting on the water but its heart rate may elevate exponentially and so these are some of the things we were thinking about in terms of the design set up of that previous study.”

McPherson said they are hoping to compare some of these older numbers to the ones they discover.

“Maybe we can confirm them or maybe we’ll find out those numbers were off a bit,” said McPherson.

Williams said that one of the ultimate goals of his lab is to be able to create shortcuts for researchers so that they can estimate carrying capacity without doing costly research in the field.

“It takes a lot of time and money to watch ducks in the field and record their behaviors as well as go out in the field and collect the amount of food that’s on the landscape. If we can get ourselves to a place where we feel like we’ve exhausted the data collection and there are no surprises, we could find shortcuts to make these estimates in the future,” said Williams. “Certainly, that would be a gold standard for us, especially for the state or federal agencies, who could use broad summaries of the data and extrapolate that to where their conservation goals are for the future.”

McPherson, who grew up hunting and fishing in eastern Virginia, said he is looking to determine these carrying capacity estimates in order for future generations to understand and appreciate wildlife.

“My interest in conserving waterfowl populations is to ensure that not only can I continue to enjoy this sport but future generations can enjoy it as well,” said McPherson.

In addition to support from DU and USGS PWRC, the research was also supported by the Black Duck Joint Venture, the Upper Mississippi/Great Lakes Joint Venture and the Waterfowl Research Foundation.

Article by Adam Thomas

Photo courtesy of Jake McPherson

This article can also be viewed on UDaily.

Summer Scholar Amelia Griffith looks for ways to defend key global food source

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Amelia Griffith is a biochemistry major from Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.

Driven to Discover Summer Scholars at UD image

Q: What are you studying, where and with whom?

Griffith: I am doing research on rice in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources in the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences, working with Professors Angelia Seyfferth and Nicole Donofrio. The project I am working on looks at two naturally occurring stresses on rice – arsenic uptake and rice blast fungus – and how they interact simultaneously.

Q: What is it about this topic that interests you?

Griffith: I have been interested in plant science research because I have always liked plants and it involves applied biochemistry. I think plants and crops are important in considering the sustainability of people and our planet. With the growing human population, it has become more and more important to develop better ways of feeding people and increasing crop yields. I think it is also important to be able to do this with minimal impact on the earth. This is something I would like to work on in the future.

Q: What is a typical day like?

Griffith: Since I have been working on this project for about a year, I have done many different things, depending on where I was in the project. This summer I have mainly been working on doing quantitative polymerase chain reactions (qPCR) to quantify and compare the expression of particular stress genes to see how the different treatments of arsenic, nutrients, and infection affect the health of the plants. On a typical day this summer, I do a qPCR reaction in the morning and after lunch I wash some dishes in the lab and do some data analysis of my qPCR results.

Q: What is the coolest thing you’ve gotten to do on the project?

Griffith: The coolest thing I’ve gotten to do on this project is probably confocal imaging. Last year I grew rice hydroponically and at different times I took leaf segments from each treatment and drop-inoculated the leaves with the rice blast fungus. The next day after the inoculation, I took the leaves to the Delaware Biotechnology Institute (DBI) to use the confocal microscope there. We were able to take extremely magnified pictures of the leaf segments and see the fungus infection in the cells. Even though it did not work as well as we wanted it to, it was still an interesting process and I got some cool pictures of the rice.

Q: What has surprised you most about your experience?

Griffith: I was most surprised with how much trial and error was involved in research. There are a lot of things that can go wrong and a lot of things don’t work out the way they are expected to. On this project, I have spent a lot of time troubleshooting, particularly with confocal imaging and qPCR. However, a lot of times with the help of others in the labs and with experience, I was able to get better results.

Q: Dreaming big, where do you hope this work could lead?

Griffith: I hope that this research will help me gain lab experience and help me get into graduate school. I am currently looking for master’s programs in plant breeding and genetics. I think I would like to continue research in plant science in the future, perhaps working in industry. I hope to someday help develop a way of making crops and food healthier and more readily available to people worldwide.

Q: If you had to summarize your experience in only one word, what would it be?

Griffith: Stimulating.

Q: What do you enjoy when you are not doing this kind of work?

Griffith: I enjoy Zumba, camping, hiking and spending time with my friends, family and beagle.

Article by Beth Miller
Photo by Kathy F. Atkinson
Video by Jason Hinmon
Published on UDaily on August 24, 2018


What Do Ducks Hear? And Why Do We Care?

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Photo of two baby ducks swimming in water for hearing frequency test.Scientists from the University of Delaware have created a hearing test for ducks. The New York Times put together a video to illustrate what Kate McGrew, a masters student in wildlife ecology at the University of Delaware, was able to find out and why this may up saving the lives of countless ducks.

Why should we care? “This was no frivolous inquiry. Sea ducks, like the ones she trained, dive to catch their prey in oceans around the world and are often caught unintentionally in fish nets and killed.”

Read more about these sea ducks here.

Warrington Farm featured in USDA’s ‘As if You Were There’ virtual demonstration project

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The University of Delaware is working with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) on “As if You Were There,” a project highlighting key climate adaptation practices at farm and forest sites within the region.

Through interactive 360 degree photography and videos, users embark on virtual field tours. UD’s Warrington Irrigation Research Farm in Harbeson, Delaware is one of the featured locations in this USDA Northeast Climate Hub virtual demonstration project; studies at Warrington analyze water management, maximizing crop yields and improving profits.

Land grant universities across the northeast region collaborated with the USDA on the “As if You Were There” effort. Jennifer Volk, associate director of UD Cooperative Extension and an environmental quality specialist, serves as UD’s liaison to the Northeast Climate Hub. Volk took on a prominent role on this project as the production lead; she coordinated with researchers and Cooperative Extension personnel at each institution and built many of the virtual stories.

Corn Plants from Underneath at the Warrington Farm in Sussex Delaware“Many of the adaptation practices being investigated by universities in our region are practices that farmers can use right now. They can make their operations more resilient to current temperature and precipitation conditions,” Volk said. “I get the sense that most people think about some far off distant future when we talk about climate change and that seems very unknown and unpredictable. But, our weather stations show temperatures have been increasing; we have recently experienced some pretty extreme rainfall. It is important to share strategies for immediate benefits, which will also put us in a better position to deal with the uncertainties of the future.”

Visitors can see how others in the northeast are adapting to the changes in climate and by sharing adaptation experiences through demonstration, new ideas and techniques.

The project transports viewers directly into what climate resilience planning looks like in real-time.

“The purpose of this project is to harness new technology combined with educational storytelling to engage more people in climate informed decision-making,” said Erin Lane, Coordinator for the USDA Northeast Climate Hub and a leader for this project. “We want to help capture and share the stories of innovative land managers and researchers. The intent is to provide our audience with an interactive experience which will create greater understanding and inspiration. The tours are designed to make you feel ‘as if you were there.’”

Water management research at Warrington

By improving water management, farmers can be more sure that crops receive adequate water throughout the growing season. A more efficient irrigation system can save money, energy and reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Given to the University by Everett Warrington in 1992, the Warrington Farm is equipped with a variable rate center pivot irrigation system, which was upgraded in 2012. In 2016, the irrigation system was upgraded again to reflect the latest advancements in irrigation management and technology.

Now, researchers can use geographic information system (GIS) software to map where and how they want certain research plots irrigated. The primary goal is to evaluate and identify the most effective and efficient water management strategies to enhance crop production and nutrient management.

In addition to the above-ground center pivot irrigation plots, a section of the farm is devoted to subsurface drip irrigation (SDI).

In the Mid-Atlantic region, high heat and droughts are likely to become more common as the climate changes. Irrigation is widely used to protect crop yields during these extreme events. More efficient use of water will help growers maintain or increase their crop yields under changing climate conditions and better protect the environment.

Photo by Jackie Arpie

Previously posted on UDaily on August 25, 2018

Food security under changing climate

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UD part of $3.5 million NSF-funded study to improve key crop resilience

Jeffrey Caplan (left), UD associate professor of plant and soil sciences, and post-doctoral researcher Kun Huang, are part of a $3.5 million NSF grant to understand how pollen develops in plants, such as corn.
Jeffrey Caplan (left), UD associate professor of plant and soil sciences, and post-doctoral researcher Kun Huang, are part of a $3.5 million NSF grant to understand how pollen develops in plants, such as corn.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Delaware, the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and Stanford University have been awarded a four-year, $3.5 million National Science Foundation grant to address concerns about reduced harvests of corn and other cereal grasses.

The project will focus on understanding the small ribonucleic acid (RNA) pathways involved in anther development and crop development when plants are challenged by adverse environmental conditions. Small RNAs are tiny messengers that carry genetic information inside living cells, in this case anthers—the site of pollen development in plants.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, grains such as wheat, corn and rice grown in the United States account for roughly 25 percent of all grains worldwide. Changes to climate, including the frequency and intensity of extreme weather, are expected to impact crop yields at a time when the planet’s population — and the demand for food — is rising.

The collaborative effort brings together expertise in plant genomics and targeted genetic changes; cutting-edge imaging techniques; and bioinformatics, the science of collecting and analyzing complex biological data, with a focus on developmental biology to meet the demands of producing more nutritious food in climates with higher temperatures.

Jeffrey Caplan, UD associate professor of plant and soil sciences in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, is a co-principal investigator on the project, which is led by Blake Meyers, a member of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and professor in the University of Missouri’s Division of Plant Sciences. The work is a continuation of a previous NSF study Meyers began while chair of UD’s Department of Plant and Soil Sciences.

Caplan and his collaborators will investigate the life cycle and functions of a class of RNAs that support anther development in grass flowers, which are flowers that are pollinated by wind, eliminating the need for eye-catching petals to attract insects. Anthers are critical in the reproduction of flowering plants because they are the site of pollen development and contain the sperm cells necessary for reproduction. In corn, also known as maize, anthers are located on the whispy tassels found at the top of the cornstalk. Prior research has demonstrated that anther development will often stall or fail under high temperatures, leaving the plants sterile or with reduced fertility, thus decreasing the harvest.

Backstory on corn

Anthers are particularly important to the production of hybrid corn seed. Hybrid corn seed differs from naturally pollinated corn seed in that it is produced by cross-pollinating plants and its use has contributed to increases in agricultural production in the 20th century. Corn is one of the most important crops in global agriculture, in part because of the widespread use of hybrid seeds that have high yields.

Knowledge gained from this research can also be extended to wheat and barley, two important cereal grains.

“A more detailed understanding of the molecular basis of pollen development and male fertility enables improvements in seed production, including hybrid seeds; in the grasses, hybrid corn and rice have significantly boosted world food production,” Meyers said. “Outcomes could include new genetic pathways for more precise control of male fertility and plants with fertility that is more resilient to distressed environments.”

Prior work demonstrated that these small RNAs are required for robust male fertility under even slightly stressful temperature changes. The project focuses on corn anthers because of the ease of staging and dissection, the numerous developmental mutants with cloned genes and the importance of understanding male fertility to the production of hybrid corn seed.

Imaging as a critical component of the work

Caplan’s role in the project will be to determine where these small RNAs are localized within the anther using advanced imaging techniques. Specifically, his team’s work will shed light on where these small RNAs are processed and expressed within each cell, and where they are located within the different tissue layers of the anther over time.

Caplan’s group has developed a method to produce a full 3D rendering of the whole anther, allowing the researchers to visualize the distribution of these small RNAs over the crop’s development.

“Anthers on corn are small in size but they have this beautiful organization that develops as different small RNAs are expressed at various times during the anther’s development,” said Caplan, who also directs the bioimaging center at the Delaware Biotechnology Institute, located near UD’s Newark campus. “Imaging can help visualize and quantify these small RNA developments in relation to other things happening within the cell, and inform understanding of how these small RNAs regulate pollen development.”

The research project will also include training of students in plant and computational biology via continued integration with long-running and successful undergraduate and high school internship programs.

About The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center

Founded in 1998, the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center is a not-for-profit research institute with a mission to improve the human condition through plant science. Research, education and outreach aim to have impact at the nexus of food security and the environment and position the St. Louis region as a world center for plant science. The center’s work is funded through competitive grants from many sources, including the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Photo illustration by Christian Derr

Jake Bowman reflects on 17 years of deer research at UD

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When Jake Bowman came to the University of Delaware 17 years ago after getting his doctorate from Mississippi State University, he encountered a problem with regards to deer research that he had never experienced before. Not only did some of the people he talked to have no idea about the number of deer in the area, some of them even thought that the animals were endangered.

UD Prof. Jake Bowman learned early that many people in Delaware were unaware of the deer population in the state.“That was kind of like a ‘Wow’ moment for me. I’m at a place where people don’t realize that deer are as abundant as they were in colonial times so it was kind of like, we need to do some things [to raise awareness],” said Bowman, chair for the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology

Read the full article on UDaily.

 

The Art of Scientific Publishing with Harold Drake

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Scientific journals have very high rejection rates — 75 percent or greater. The transformation of a manuscript into a published paper is a major challenge. Learn the logistics of publishing in scientific journals and approaches for minimizing perils from expert editor Harold Drake, Chair of the Department of Ecological Microbiology at the University of Bayreuth in Germany and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology (AEM). AEM has a broad interdisciplinary profile and is the number one cited journal in microbiology and biotechnology. AEM is published by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) which publishes many journals in various fields of microbiology, including virology, immunology, and clinical microbiology.

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