Portal Phenocam

You may have noticed the super-cool daily images featured in last week’s post. They’re from our new network camera.

For starters, it allows us to do things like watch our desert field site turn from brown to green in no time flat (and back to brown again this winter).

 

 

 

 

But even cooler, our camera is part of the PhenoCam Network. They’re organizing a network of near-surface remote sensing images from sites all over the world. This creates a time series of images, in RGB and infrared, that can be used for phenology monitoring by the PhenoCam folks, us, or anyone who’s interested.

 

 

 

 

The PhenoCam folks make all the imagery freely available to download. From installation and configuration to image analysis, they provide awesome support. And their R package phenopix provides a quickstart to using phenocam imagery.

How fast can a desert turn green?

In the desert, water is life. Without it, the desert is brown and dusty. At our site, the rains come twice a year – once during the ‘winter’ (I put that in quotes for our readers where winter means snow and/or extended periods below freezing) and once during the summer. Water in the summer and water in the winter don’t have the same effect on the desert, though. Plants need both warmth and water to grow. When rain falls in the desert in the winter, growth is slow and typically waits until the warmer temperatures of spring. In the summer, though, the high temperatures and the rain from Arizona’s monsoons make for an explosive combination. How fast can the desert turn green? Here’s a series of photos from our site – one per day for a week that we think conveys this better than words. Enjoy the slide show:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

You might be wondering if that was it. Was that as green as the desert got? Here it is, as of yesterday, 3 and a half weeks after that first brown picture: August 1^st was definitely not peak green:

The grasses are greening up nicely and there is no bareground to be seen in the foreground.Water, heat, and sunshine – a very powerful combo indeed!

 

 

Pregnancy in Kangaroo rats

~While everyone’s busy at ESA this week, we’d like to keep the 40th anniversary ball rolling with a guest post from a visiting researcher at Portal. Jess Dudley has been using the Portal area to compare pregnancy in kangaroo rats and Australian marsupials. We’ll be featuring other guest posts through the rest of the year. (If you’d like to do something similar, please send us your info!)~

 

In July 2015 I travelled the 24+ hours from Sydney, Australia to the beautiful town of Portal to research pregnancy in Kangaroo rats. To everyone’s astonishment we do not have Kangaroo rats in Australia! I am sure I don’t need to explain my fascination with Kangaroo rats with this audience but in terms of pregnancy they have some unique features which differ from most rodents. This finding by King and Tibbitts in the 1960’s led me to wonder how the placenta forms during pregnancy in these resilient animals. To answer these questions I was lucky enough to visit Portal twice in the summers of 2015 and 2017 to trap Kangaroo rats and collect tissue from the females. I have completed Transmission and Scanning Electron Microscopy as well as Western blotting and Immunofluorescence microscopy on the uterine samples from pregnant Merrriam’s kangaroo rats to determine what structural and molecular changes are needed for implantation of the early embryo and ultimately a successful pregnancy.

Fat tailed dunnart (Sminthopsis crassicaudata) (https://museumvictoria.com.au)

 

My initial research into the molecular mechanisms of implantation and pregnancy began in an Australian marsupial species the Fat tailed dunnart (Sminthopsis crassicaudata) which has the same partly invasive placenta as the Kangaroo rat.

Fat tailed dunnart (Sminthopsis crassicaudata) (https://museumvictoria.com.au) range. IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) 2016.

 

Through these comparative studies we have found that the molecular mechanisms allowing for successful pregnancy are conserved among eutherian and marsupial mammals during the early stages of pregnancy regardless of how invasive their placenta becomes.

An Immunofluorescence image showing localization of adhesion molecules in green and cell nuclei in blue from a non-pregnant Merriams’ Kangaroo rat. Uterine Epithelial Cells = UEC. Lumen = L.

Transmission Electron Microscopy image of uterine epithelial cells from a Merriams’ Kangaroo rat in the
early stages of pregnancy.

It has been an amazing experience to work in the Chihuahuan Desert. I was introduced to animals that I had never heard of and witnessed countless stunning sunrises and sunsets as well as beautiful starry night skies. It was an experience I will never forget. I would like to thank Glenda Yenni, Leigh Nicholson and all of the wonderful people at the Southwestern Research Station for their assistance and advice during the completion of this project.

A male K-rat hiding behind a SWRS intern (©Leigh Nicholson)

 

Jessica S. Dudley | PhD candidate
The University of Sydney

Portal at the Ecological Society of America Meeting

Every year ecologists from across the U.S. descend upon a city to share their most recent findings with each other at the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting. Normally, the locals are a little befuddled by the sudden influx of people wearing Tevas and Chacos and wearing clothing from various outdoor gear companies, but this year the meeting is being held in Portland, Oregon!

This year there are several presentations featuring data from the Portal Project, ranging from a poster to talks to a workshop. If you are going to be at the meeting and are interested in hearing about the site, learning more about the data, or taking a Data Carpentry that uses a teaching version of our data, check out the events listed below. These are just the things we happen to know about. If your talk uses data from Portal (either focused on the site or as part of a bigger meta-analysis / macroecological study), let us know in the comments and we’ll add you to the list!

Saturday, August 5th

8:00 AM-5:00 PM A105, Oregon Convention Center

Data Carpentry in Ecology Workshop

Organizers: Monica Granados, University of Guelph and Auriel M.V. Fournier, University of Arkansas – Fayetteville

(Paraphrased from the Meeting Program) This workshop uses a tabular ecology dataset from the Portal Project Teaching Database and teaches data cleaning, management, analysis and visualization. We use a single dataset throughout the workshop to model the data management and analysis workflow that a researcher would use.

Monday, August 7th

02:50 PM – 03:10 PM Oregon Convention Center – C120-121:

Novel approach for the analysis of community dynamics: Separating rapid reorganizations from gradual trends by Erica Christensen, S.K. Morgan Ernest and David J. Harris, Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, University of Florida.

03:20 PM – 03:40 PM Oregon Convention Center – C120-121:

Do existing communities slow community reorganization in response to changes in assembly processes? by Erica Christensen and S.K. Morgan Ernest, Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL

Thursday, August 10th

04:30 PM – 06:30 PM Oregon Convention Center – Exhibit Hall

DNA metabarcoding of fecal samples provides insight into desert rodent diet partitioning by Ellen K. Bledsoe, Samantha M. Wisely and S.K. Morgan Ernest, Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL

Friday, August 11^th

8:00 am-08:30 am Oregon Convention Center, Portland Ballroom 257

Advancing biodiversity-ecosystem function research by integrating community assembly: The CAFE approach by Katherine Bannar-Martin, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Colin T. Kremer, Yale University, S.K. Morgan Ernest, University of Florida, Mathew A. Leibold, University of Texas at Austin, sCAFE working group, iDiv

Hope to see you there!