��̽̽ - Plant Biology

Measuring Mansfield's Alpine Plants, One Square Meter at a Time

saa — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 17:27:17 +0000

Throughout the state of Vermont, there exists only a sparse 210 acres of land where alpine plants — plants that grow in harsh, high-elevation climates above tree lines — can thrive. Mount Mansfield, the highest point in the state, holds nearly 200 of those acres. And in the face of oncoming climate change and a dramatic drop in snow pack density and days without snow on the top of the mountain, these plants are at risk.

Catherine Wessel, a graduate student in ��̽̽’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ department of Plant Biology’s Field Naturalist Program, spent the summer studying the minute details of these plants at the top of Mansfield, one square meter at a time.

“Nonvascular plants (like mosses) like staying really low to the ground and so they’re less exposed to the elements,” Wessel said. “But there are fairly few vascular plants that can survive in the Alpine just because it is such an extreme area. There are probably 15 common vascular plants in the alpine regions of Vermont.”

Two of the more common alpine plants that grow on Mansfield are bilberries and lingonberries, both low-growing shrubs that produce edible berries. Lingonberries have been used to make jams and jellies for centuries, with lingonberry jam being a staple in Nordic countries.

To analyze alpine plants on Mansfield’s summit, Wessel uses a simple square meter made from PVC piping. She places the square on a randomized spot, called a quadrat, and places another, smaller square inside.

Wessel uses a simple, lightweight PVC pipe frame to examine Mansfield's alpine flora.

“What I’m measuring is species frequency and cover for vascular plants, bryophytes, and lichens” Wessel said. Combing through the quadrat and the sub-quadrats, Wessel continually asks one simple question: more or less? Does this quadrat section have more or less than 50% vaccinium uliginosum (bilberry) coverage? If it’s more than 50%, does it have more or less than 75% coverage? This back and forth calculation continues until Wessel finishes the quadrat, determining the coverage for each species present, and moves onto the next one, completing just a handful per day.

“I’ve done 65 quadrats now. It’s incredibly slow going,” Wessel said. “I’m driving over an hour from Burlington and then often hiking about another hour to get to the site.” At her current rate, it would take Wessel decades to measure the alpine plants on Mansfield. But the goal of her research isn’t to analyze all 210 acres, but to sample a representative area and expand on an earlier study on alpine plants published in 1995 by William Howland, which has been monumental in the understanding alpine and tundra plants on Mansfield.

“(The 1995 study) was comprehensive, especially with its locations. Some of the locations I found the exact spot and was able to set up directly there,” Wessel said. “And for those that I couldn't find a site marker, I was able to meet with Howland and he directed me to the areas that he studied. Hopefully we'll be able to look at these trends over the last 30 years having this as a baseline. Whereas if you if you don't have an original study to go off of, it's still interesting to see what the current state is. But there's less of a comparison that you're able to do.”

Wessel combs through just a handful of quadrats each time she hikes Mansfield's summit, carefully examining the frame for plant coverage.

And while the 1995 study was comprehensive — Howland measured elements like soil depth and character, pH levels, and surface morphology like the slope and aspect of monitoring sites — Wessel explained that it was not complete in its scope.

“There wasn’t really any analysis that was completed because it was a contract to complete data collection,” Wessel said. “Along with species data, there’s also environmental data that was collected, which I’m also collecting now. It will be interesting to do analysis on that and figure out if there are some species that are more likely to grow in association with others, or if some are really impacted by the aspect of the slope or the steepness of the slope and how much soil depth impacts species present.”

Some key data trends Wessel is incorporating into her research is snow, specifically snow pack and days without snow on the top of Mansfield.

On Mansfield in the summer, the summit can reach temperatures below 40º F (5º C) or below, necessitating warm layers and hoods.

“Almost 30 years have gone by since the the study from 90s, and looking at the climate data for Mount Mansfield, it's incredible to see the amount of difference, especially in the snow pack since the 90s,” Wessel said. Snow pack has dropped considerably over the last three decades, and other researchers at ��̽̽ studying snow pack know the risks of warming winters.

“Downhill skiing, with the help of snowmaking, will likely remain largely viable in Vermont up until approximately 2050,” the Gund Institute’s and The Nature Conservancy’s Vermont Climate Change Assessment said. “By 2080, the Vermont ski season will be shortened by two weeks (under a low emissions scenario) or by a whole month (under a high emissions scenario), and some ski areas will remain viable.”

Wessel’s data also shows that since 1991, Mount Mansfield has experienced a drop in snow coverage. Throughout the 90’s, Mansfield experienced a steady 200 days of snow coverage. Now, it’s dropped to just over 160, posing some significant problems for alpine plant life.

“A loss in snow pack exposes these plants to way higher amounts of radiation from the sun, wind in the winter, and harsher conditions because the snowpack insulates them,” Wessel said. “The impact of losing these days of snowpack would likely impact some of these communities.”

Now that Wessel’s field season has wrapped, she’ll spend the next portion of her research analyzing data and creating education materials. For this project, she partnered with the Green Mountain Club, a nonprofit dedicated to maintaining Vermont’s mountain lands and trails.

“Rather than just writing an academic paper or just analyzing the data, the Green Mountain Club and ��̽̽ want to figure out what ways make this more interesting and accessible to people,” Wessel said. “How do you create a compelling story with what this data is telling us, not just about Mansfield but our alpine zones across New England, how they’ve been changing, and what might continue to happen there?”

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Mount Mansfield is just one of a few locations where alpine plants can grow in Vermont.

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Catherine Wessel spent the summer researching high-altitude plants on the top of Mount Mansfield, hoping to understand how climate change and the loss of snow will affect them. (Photos by Joshua Defibaugh)

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AMD Gives ��̽̽ $1 Million to Boost Computing Power for COVID-19 Research

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 16:47:20 +0000

The microchip manufacture AMD has made a $1 million gift to ��̽̽ to boost its high performance computing capacity and enhance the university’s COVID-19 research efforts. ��̽̽ is among the first 21 schools the company has supported through its AMD HPC Fund for COVID-19 Research program, designed to accelerate COVID research at universities around the country.

��̽̽ will use the funds in two ways. Researchers will be able to use the equivalent of $500,000 in market-based fees for access to AMD’s unique cloud-based high performance computing platform, a remote supercomputing facility used by researchers around the world. Faculty will receive special training in the cloud-based system, which will substantially expand the high performance computing capacity available to ��̽̽ researchers for a period of years.

In addition, the company has given the university $500,000 to acquire new high performance processing units for the Vermont Advanced Computing Core, the university’s supercomputing facility. The new processors will boost the computer power of the VACC, already one of the fastest supercomputers in New England and one of the 100 fastest academic supercomputers in the country, by 25%.

“In response to the pandemic, many ��̽̽ faculty are pursuing research projects related to understanding the transmission and prevalence of COVID-19 and potential treatments for the disease,” said Kirk Dombrowski, vice president for research at ��̽̽. “Since virtually all of this work requires high performance computing, we are very grateful to AMD for its generous gift. The work it funds will enable to us to advance one the three pillars of the university’s strategic plan—using our distinctive research strengths to create healthy societies—and make a real contribution to ending this pandemic and preparing for future outbreaks.”

“AMD is proud to be working with ��̽̽ to bring the power of high performance computing technology to the fight against the coronavirus pandemic,” said Mark Papermaster, executive vice president and chief technology officer at AMD. “These donations of AMD EPYC and Radeon Instinct processors will help researchers both deepen their understanding of COVID-19 and improve the ability to respond to future potential threats to global health.”

VACC director Chris Danforth welcomes the resources for COVID-19 related work. “We’re thrilled to join other universities in receiving this tremendous gift from AMD,” he said. “Scientific computation is a critical component of the research enterprise—all the more so when we’re fighting a monstrous global crisis—and the new hardware will accelerate ��̽̽’s creative contributions.”

The university will use its enhanced computing power on a range of COVID-19 projects in an array of academic disciplines, Dombrowski said, from plant biology to computational chemistry. They include:

Analyzing the structure and behavior of the spike protein in the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Research team: the Jianing Li group in Chemistry and the Juan Vanegas group in Physics.
Creating large scale fluid dynamics simulations of COVID-19 droplets as they travel through the air to better understand how the disease is spread. Research team: the Yves Dubief group in Mechanical Engineering working in partnership with the French government.
Real-time analysis of billions of tweets to quantify the pandemic’s emotional impact on society. Research team: the Computational Story Lab and the Vermont Complex Systems Center.
Modeling the interaction between social distancing behavior and PPE use in stemming transmission of the virus on college campuses. Research team: the Jane Molofsky group in Plant Biology.
Analyzing the interplay between contact structure, interventions and behavior on pandemic dynamics with the goal of preventing a second wave. Research team led by Laurent Hébert-Dufresne in Computer Science.

The ��̽̽ Vermont Advanced Computing Core facilitates discovery by providing faculty researchers with rapid access to large-scale advanced computing infrastructure and responsive technical support. It also provides tools and instruction allowing for the inclusion of high-performance computing in the classroom.

The AMD COVID-19 HPC fund was established to provide research institutions with computing resources to accelerate medical research on COVID-19 and other diseases. In addition to the initial donations of $15 million of high-performance computing systems, AMD has contributed technology and technical resources to nearly double the peak system of the “Corona” system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which is being used to provide additional computing power for molecular modeling in support of COVID-19 research.

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A $1 million gift from AMD will boost ��̽̽’s computing power and allow faculty to tackle a variety of research issues related to COVID-19, including analyzing the structure and behavior of the spike protein in the SARS-CoV-2 virus. (Photo: Centers for Disease Control)

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The Last Unknown

Anonymous — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 14:28:38 +0000

Imagine if there were, say, 600 species of giraffes: some the size of a shrew, some three stories tall, some with purple spots. Of course, many giraffes could be found in Africa, but suppose there were reports of rare ones, wandering high in the mountains of the remote tropical island of New Guinea.

And also imagine that no one studied any of these species, that there were no giraffe experts anywhere. Now substitute “fern” for “giraffe” and you have some rough sense of the work of fern expert and University of Vermont research professor Michael Sundue—and why he’s traveled to New Guinea on three expeditions to look for ferns.

In a study published August 5, in the journal Nature, Sundue, and three other ��̽̽ plant scientists, joined a global team of researchers from 56 institutions to present the first expert-verified checklist to the vascular plants of New Guinea and surrounding islands. So much uncertainty surrounded the number of New Guinea plants known to science that estimates ranged from 9,000 to 25,000. The researchers pored through digital records and plant collections scattered around the world, drawing on the expertise of 99 specialists—to tally 13,634 species in 264 families, with thousands yet to be discovered.

The team’s work reveals that New Guinea is the world’s richest island for plants.

Black Hole

In his office, at ��̽̽’s renowned Pringle Herbarium (currently housed in Jeffords Hall), Sundue holds up a dried plant mounted on newsprint. “Oh that’s sexy; that’s a Selaginella,” he says, pointing to a comely frond that looks a lot like a fern, but more technically is a lycophyte. “I’m not an expert on this. No one else studies this group of plants. There’s no Selaginella expert on Earth—and there are 600 species worldwide.”

Sundue is an expert on two other groups of ferns—which is why he was called in on the new Nature study. But his goal is not simply to count and identify plants. “The bigger question is where are biodiversity hotspots in the world—and why?” he says. “I’ve been trying to address that for ferns.” New Guinea has been a “black hole,” Sundue says, for many plants including ferns. “It’s remote, dangerous, hard to get to with almost no roads. You can’t just check an app or look at a museum collection—a lot of species have almost no records. So how are you supposed to interpret the evolution of plants on Earth—if you have missing pieces?” he says. “You have to go there and collect.”

He holds up the dried plant from New Guinea in the bright Vermont sunshine. “That’s a pretty handsome Selaginella,” Sundue says. “It's one of the most ancient surviving lineages of plants on Earth.”

Mega-Diversity

When the eighteenth-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus set out to catalog all the world’s plants and animals, he proposed their origin was a high mountain in Paradise: an island on the equator revealed when the primeval waters started to subside. “While his notion of one source area for all organisms was soon abandoned,” says Rodrigo Càmara-Leret—from the University of Zurich and the lead author on the new study—if he were alive today, Linneaus “would likely choose New Guinea as his symbol of a Paradise island teeming with life.”

Except for the frozen rock of Greenland, New Guinea is the largest island in the world, just north of Australia and near the equator. Shaped like a crook-necked bird, it covers more than 300,000 square miles—nearly twice the size of California—with a huge spine of mountains that rise to over 16,000 feet. With very complex geology, New Guinea supports a dazzling array of ecosystems—some of the best-preserved on the planet—from mangrove jungles to alpine grasslands to ice-covered mountaintops. It’s not surprising that its size and geographic diversity yields the world’s richest island flora.

From his work in New Guinea and other places, “we can clearly see now that ferns are most diverse in tropical mountains,” Sundue says—largely because “there are so many niches stacked on top of each other combined with the fact that there’s low seasonality.” This lets the ferns specialize on one habitat and climate type, genetically isolated from each other by rugged topography, leading to species formation.

Since the 17th century, botanists have described and named plants collected in New Guinea. Thousands of plants from the island are stored in herbaria there as well as the Netherlands, Great Britain and the US—including ��̽̽. But despite advances in the past decades in clarifying the taxonomy of many New Guinea plants, publications about these plants have remained scattered, as botanists worked mostly independently from each other. “Great uncertainty remained as to how many plant species grew in New Guinea,” says Càmara-Leret. “Effectively, compared to other areas, like Amazonia which had plant checklists recently published, New Guinea remained the ‘Last Unknown’”— until the publication of this new study in Nature.

More to Discover

The results show that New Guinea has 19% more species than Madagascar and 22% more species than Borneo—making it the richest island in the world for plants. Also the new research shows that 68% of New Guinea’s plants are only found on that island; this high level of endemism is unmatched in tropical Asia. “And it reveals the value of experts,” says Sundue, including fellow fern experts—David Barrington, chair of ��̽̽’s Department of Plant Biology; recent ��̽̽ doctoral student Weston Testo; and Pedro Schwartsburd, a long-term visitor to Sundue’s lab from Brazil—and co-authors on the new Nature study. Using online taxonomic platforms alone, the scientists estimate, would have inflated the species count in New Guinea by 22%—many thousands of false data points or confused names.

“The study also shows that we need to invest in training a large group of young and resident taxonomists in New Guinea,” says Sundue. New Guinea plants have been mainly studied by non-resident experts, of whom 40% are retired or within ten years of turning 65 years old. But the team estimates that 3-4,000 new plants could be added to their checklist in the next few decades if there is long-term support for developing a new generation of local experts. “Land-use change is an increasing threat so more botanical exploration is therefore urgently needed if unknown species are to be collected before they disappear,” the team writes in the new study.

“A checklist may not seem that interesting,” Sundue says, “but it’s foundational”—giving future studies greater accuracy and clearer targets, like focusing DNA work on species in particularly rich groups and “identifying blank spots on the map to go explore,” Sundue says. “Biologists are trying to put together the history of life on Earth and that is done by examining all of the constituent organisms that live here,” he says, “not just the ones that are easy to find.”

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International team reveals richest island flora in world

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Where are the biodiversity hotspots in the world and why? —��̽̽ researcher Michael Sundue

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Fern expert Michael Sundue collected this Selaginella in New Guinea—and brought it back to study in Vermont. He and three other ��̽̽ scientists are co-authors on a new study in the journal Nature revealing the staggering diversity of plant life on this tropical island. (Photo: Joshua Brown)

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Plant biologist Michael Sundue on an expedition to the Baining Mountains on the island of New Britain, part of Papua New Guinea. (Photo: Kore Maraia)

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Surprising Recovery of Red Spruce Shows Value of Clean Air Act

Anonymous — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 18:07:59 +0000

Since the 1960s, scientists at ��̽̽ have been documenting the decline of red spruce trees, casualties of the damage caused by acid rain on northeastern forests.

But now, surprising new research shows that red spruce are making a comeback—and that a combination of reduced pollution mandated by the 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act and changing climate are behind the resurgence.

The new study was led by Alexandra Kosiba of ��̽̽ with co-authors Paul Schaberg of the USDA Forest Service and University of Vermont researchers Shelly Rayback and Gary Hawley.

The scientists examined data from 658 trees in 52 plots spanning five states—and found that more than 75 percent of red spruce trees and 90 percent of the plots exhibited increasing growth since 2001.

“Our evidence suggests that the Clean Air Act is working to enhance conditions for red spruce,” says Kosiba, a staff scientist for the Forest Ecosystem Monitoring Cooperative at ��̽̽. “This is a surprising and positive story.”

The team’s study was published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

Recovery, for now

The research team assessed the relationship between red spruce growth and factors that may influence growth such as tree age and diameter, elevation, slope, geographical position, and environmental variables including temperature, precipitation, a suite of climate measures—and the sulfur and nitrogen pollution that cause acid to be deposited in falling rain and snow.

The results show a clear signal that “acid rain decline has helped red spruce recover, as well as higher temperatures in the fall, winter, and spring,” says Paul Schaberg, a researcher in the Forest Service’s Northern Research Station and adjunct professor at ��̽̽. “Higher temperatures help some species and hurt others—right now, red spruce are benefiting, but they could be vulnerable to change in the future.”

Red spruce have unique characteristics that make them particularly susceptible to acid rain. For example, they have little genetic variation and they have only moderate tolerance to the cold. But they are also able to “wake up” and photosynthesize during warm interludes of the dormant season, a characteristic that may better position the species to take advantage of recent climate shifts that extend the functional growing season. Yet the study notes that future changes in habitat suitability may not be as favorable to red spruce as those already experienced—it will likely depend on how extreme future changes are.

“Red spruce are adapted to a certain range of climate conditions. Our work shows that reduced acid rain, warmer winter temperatures, and a lengthening growing season have benefited them recently,” says Kosiba. “But we don’t know how much change they’ll be able to tolerate in a warmer future.”

The scientists are confident that their research represents the current state of red spruce in the entire region, according to Kosiba. “Our study included a broad range of tree ages and sizes as well as a variety of plot locations and characteristics,” she said. “We are confident that we are capturing the regional status of red spruce forests, not just a snapshot of a specific location.”

“More broadly our work demonstrates the importance of using research to identify ecosystem problems that inform policy to mitigate those issues, and result in biological recovery,” noted Kosiba.

Pioneers on the mountain

Pioneering studies on acid rain were conducted by famed University of Vermont researcher Hub Vogelmann and other ��̽̽ scientists on Vermont’s iconic mountain, Camel’s Hump, in the 1960s. This scientific work was instrumental to the formation of the 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act that have brought reductions in acid deposition in the Northeast. Later research by Paul Schaberg, Gary Hawley, and others led to a deeper understanding of how calcium leaching from the soil was a key part of the mechanism that caused acid rain to damage spruce trees and other plants.

“Calcium is slow to replenish in the ecosystem, so even though we've had this decline in acid rain, there has been a delay in seeing recovery,” says Kosiba who completed her doctorate in forest science at ��̽̽ in 2017. “There was some thought that, maybe, red spruce was not going to be a big component of our forests anymore, that there was too much damage.” Even as recently as 2003, scientists noted a major winter-kill of red spruce and acid rain was a key culprit.

Although the pollution that causes acid rain in the Northeast has been greatly reduced in recent decades, there have been very few studies to show that this cleaner air has improved the health of the region’s forests. “So it’s great that we're finally seeing recovery of spruce,” Kosiba says, who notes that a recent study of red spruce in the Central Appalachians came to a similar conclusion. “There is a legacy of red spruce research in Vermont — starting with Hub Vogelmann. His work contributed to legislative change that reduced acid rain. Now our new research helps continue the story. It shows that the Clean Air Act works."

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��̽̽ and Forest Service study identifies reduced pollution and warmer winters as likely cause of resurgence

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"The Clean Air Act is working to enhance conditions for red spruce." —��̽̽'s Ali Kosiba

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<p>Surprising new research shows that red spruce are making a comeback—and that a combination of reduced pollution mandated by the 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act and changing climate are behind the resurgence.</p>

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Forest ecologist Ali Kosiba takes the measure of a red spruce. Her new research made a surprising discovery: red spruce is recovering, after decades of decline. (Photo: courtesy Alexandra Kosiba)

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A story can be read in the growth rings of trees. These cores help reveal the decline and recovery of red spruce. (Photo: courtesy Ali Kosiba)

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Proctor's Latest Maple Innovation? Weekends Off.

Anonymous — Thu, 31 May 2018 19:31:03 +0000

Like most sugarmakers, Brian Stowe was used to working without a break from the start of the maple sugaring season in early spring to its bitter end in mid- to late April.

“If you had dental or medical issues, taxes, anything – all that had to be done before or after; during the season, you’re committed, 24/7,” says Stowe, sugarhouse operations manager at ��̽̽’s Proctor Maple Research Center.

But after 28 sugaring seasons at the Proctor, Stowe encountered something new this year: weekends off.

Stowe owed his newfound free time to a combination of state-of-the-art new and cleverly re-purposed old technology at the Proctor sugarhouse, a model facility for the maple industry. If the innovations catch on as past improvements at the Proctor have, they could make sugar-making a vastly more humane, and profitable, enterprise in the future.

What first greets a visitor to the sugarhouse, a peaked two-story structure tucked in a grove of maples down the road from the Proctor’s main research facility in Underhill, is a sea of steel barrels just inside the door that contain the operation’s output for the year: 3,000 gallons of maple syrup, a record crop.

But it isn’t the quantity of maple syrup that made 2018 such a banner year, says Tim Perkins, a research professor in ��̽̽’s Plant Biology Department who is the Proctor’s director. It was the greatly reduced time it took to produce it – an improvement that was responsible for Stowe’s more forgiving schedule.

“In the past we made about 20 gallons of syrup for every hour of sugarhouse time,” Perkins says. “This year we produced 42 gallons of syrup for every hour,” a 110 percent improvement.

Reducing reduction

One cause of the productivity leap is the next thing a visitor sees in the sugarhouse: a gleaming slab of stainless steel and aluminum, a Lapierre Hyperbrix -- “brix” is the industry term for sugar percentage -- evaporator.

The evaporator, along with a Lapierre Hyperbrix Reverse Osmosis machine, a compact assembly of geometric steel canisters situated in a room at the back of the sugarhouse, account for a big chunk of the labor savings, Perkins says.

One of the most time-consuming aspects of maple syrup production is boiling down sap, which is 98 percent water and only two percent sugar, into syrup, 67 percent sugar, a process that is done in an evaporator, a large flat plan positioned over a steady heat source.

While only the smallest maple operations still start their production with raw sap, which takes hours to reduce, many boil sap that has first been processed using reverse osmosis, or RO, a system that employs pressure to force the sap through a fine filter, separating the water from the sugar. This process produces a concentrate that is eight to 15 percent sugar and takes less time to reduce to syrup.

The "Hyperbrix" version of RO, used at the Proctor, employs much greater pressure and two minutely fine filters to take the process to another level, yielding a concentrate that is 37 percent sugar, with about 95 percent of the water removed.

By boiling concentrate that is already two-thirds of the way to maple syrup, the Proctor operation greatly reduces the time spent evaporating over traditional RO systems and saves money on fuel.

“It takes about 43 gallons of raw sap to make a gallon of syrup, 11 gallons of concentrate at eight percent sugar and 5.8 gallons at 15 percent,” Perkins says. “It takes less than 2.5 gallons of concentrate produced by the Hyperbrix RO.”

Old school

While the productivity improvements from the Hyperbrix evaporator and Hyperbrix RO machine were critical – technology so new and advanced that only about a dozen of the machines are in use in the U.S. and Canada – an old-school piece of equipment commonly used on dairy farms, a refrigerated bulk tank used for keeping milk cool, was just as important.

“Sap is like milk – it’s perishable,” Perkins says, and concentrate even more so. “You can leave it out for little while, but not for long.”

What that meant was that last year, the first that the Proctor used the Hyperbrix equipment, every sap run and concentration cycle required a boil in the evaporator.

“The problem with that is, every time you boil, you need to clean,” Perkins says. “And whether you boil for half an hour or eight hours, it still takes two-and-a-half hours to clean.”

The frequent boiling also added to the general chaos of the sugarhouse during the season, Stowe says. “Everything was happening at once, cleaning and prepping the Hyperbrix equipment, testing pumps, tapping trees, repairing tubing, installing research projects – and boiling concentrate.”

One day a way out occurred to Perkins, an active researcher who also mans the evaporator during boils throughout the sugaring season.

“Bulk tanks aren’t used by that many maple producers, and mostly they’re using them just for storage,” he says. “But I thought, if we can bulk up the concentrate for a few days in a refrigerated tank,” it will stay fresh and “allow us to actually schedule our operations. We could look at the forecast and say, the sap is going to run Monday and Tuesday. We’ll concentrate on Tuesday and Wednesday. And then we’ll boil on Thursday.”

The difference was night and day.

“This year we had 27 sap runs over the 10-week season,” Perkins says. “Normally you would boil 27 times. But with the refrigerated bulk tank, we boiled just 11 times.”

While the extra time off allowed Stowe to “decompress” in ways he had never experienced during sugaring season, it also enabled him to use his time more productively.

“We had more time available to go out and make the repairs in the woods, which ultimately makes more sap for us, and more money,” he says.

NASA

With its gleaming high tech equipment and washable white walls covering the rustic wood framing that’s typically exposed in sugar houses, the Proctor looks like a “NASA installation,” Stowe says.

To Perkins it’s simply evolved to being a “modern food processing operation” with such improvements as plumbed water for cleaning equipment that becomes clogged with syrup. One metal pail hangs from a hook on the ceiling as reminder of the old days when Perkins and his co-workers schlepped water and brushes around the facility.

Either way, once the news gets out that the Proctor more than doubled its productivity this year while significantly cutting its costs, it’s bound to turn heads in the industry.

To its long list of its contributions – from the check valve spout that extends the season by a month or more to the capped maple saplings that allow maple syrup to made almost anywhere on earth – the efficient modern sugarhouse may be one of its most enduring.

“It really changes the time, efficiency and quality of life for sugar makers during the season.”

Both the Hyperbrix RO and evaporator are being operated at the Proctor Maple Research Center as part of a research partnership with their manufacturer, Lapierre Equipment. Some of the improvements made at the Proctor this year, and others planned for the coming season, are being funded by a memorial gift from ��̽̽ alumni Robert L. Bickford, Jr. ('43) and his wife, Oletha “Lee” Thompson Bickford ('41).

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Technology, Ingenuity Helped Center Double Productivity in 2018 Maple Season, Set Industry Standard

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Tending to the new Hyperbrix evaporator at the Proctor Maple Research Center’s sugarhouse last sugaring season are Tim Perkins (left), director, and Wade Bosley, sugaring operations specialist. (Photo: Mark Isselhardt)

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A Hyperbrix evaporator at Proctor sugarhouse, which processes maple sap concentrate from the operation's Hyperbrix RO machine. Proctor uses both machines in a research partnership with manufacturer Lapierre Equipment. (Photo: Brian Jenkins)

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New Climate Change Model May Provide Hope

Anonymous — Wed, 03 Jan 2018 17:40:34 +0000

A first-of-its-kind model—that measures the effects of human behavior on climate—provides new insight into the range of temperatures the planet may face in the coming century. And it provides “a rational basis for hope”—one of the co-authors says—that people, as the dominant cause of global temperature rise, may also be a crucial factor in helping to reduce it.

The results, published January 1 in the journal Nature Climate Change, demonstrate the importance of factoring human behavior into models of climate change.

Combining climate projections and social processes, the model predicts global temperature change ranging from 3.4 to 6.2°C by 2100, compared to 4.9°C from the climate model alone.

“A better understanding of the human perception of risk from climate change and the behavioral responses are key to curbing future climate change,” said lead author Brian Beckage, a professor of plant biology and computer science at ��̽̽.

Drawing from both social psychology and climate science, the new model investigates how human behavioral changes evolve in response to extreme climate events and affect global temperature change.

The model accounts for the dynamic feedbacks that occur naturally in the Earth’s climate system—temperature projections determine the likelihood of extreme weather events, which in turn influence human behavior. Human behavioral changes, such as installing solar panels or investing in public transportation, alter greenhouse gas emissions, which change the global temperature and thus the frequency of extreme events, leading to new behaviors, and the cycle continues.

Due to the complexity of physical processes, climate models have uncertainties in global temperature prediction. The new model found that temperature uncertainty associated with the social component was of a similar magnitude to that of the physical processes, which implies that a better understanding of the human social component is important but often overlooked.

The model found that long-term, less easily reversed behavioral changes, such as insulating homes or purchasing hybrid cars, had by far the most impact in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and thus reducing climate change, versus more short-term adjustments, such as adjusting thermostats or driving fewer miles.

Basis for hope

“It is easy to lose confidence in the capacity for societies to make sufficient changes to reduce future temperatures. When we started this project, we simply wanted to address the question as to whether there was any rational basis for ‘hope’—that is a rational basis to expect that human behavioral changes can sufficiently impact climate to significantly reduce future global temperatures,” said co-author Louis J. Gross, director of the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who co-organized the working group that produced the new study.

“Climate models can easily make assumptions about reductions in future greenhouse gas emissions and project the implications, but they do this with no rational basis for human responses,” Gross said. “The key result from this paper is that there is indeed some rational basis for hope.”

That basis for hope can be the foundation which communities can build on in adopting policies to reduce emissions, said co-author Katherine Lacasse, an assistant professor of psychology at Rhode Island College. “We may notice more hurricanes and heat waves than usual and become concerned about climate change, but we don’t always know the best ways to reduce our emissions,” she said. Programs that help reduce the cost and difficulty of making long-term changes or that bring in whole communities, Lacasse says, can help support people to take big steps that have a meaningful impact on the climate.

The new study was supported by the National Science Foundation and was a result of combined efforts of the joint Working Group on Human Risk Perception and Climate Change at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) at the University of Maryland, where ��̽̽'s Brian Beckage has been a long-time collaborator. Asim Zia, a ��̽̽ professor in Community Development and Applied Economics and computer science, was also a co-author on the new study.

"Our paper shifts the focus from the uncertainty in the physical climate system to the social components of the system—the human behavior," says Beckage, "and how to best invest resources into the social components that are most likely to have the largest impacts on reducing future climate change."

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��̽̽ professor Brian Beckage explores the results of a new study he co-led that was published in the journal Nature Climate Change. (Video: Sally McCay & Catherine Crawley)

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A better understanding of the human perception of risk from climate change and the behavioral responses are key to curbing future climate change. —��̽̽ professor Brian Beckage

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Science Survives

Anonymous — Fri, 04 Aug 2017 20:23:21 +0000

When the roof of Torrey Hall caught fire the morning of Aug. 3, burning and smoldering into the afternoon hours, ��̽̽ researchers feared that the 300,000 historic and rare plant specimens housed primarily on the top floor wouldn’t survive the blistering heat of the flames.

Or, if by some chance they did, surely the gallons of water firefighters used to control and extinguish the fire would ruin the prized scientific collection, the third largest herbarium in New England, exceeded only by those at Harvard and Yale.

But a $470,000 grant from the National Science Foundation secured in 2014 was used to upgrade storage of the collection, from wooden cabinets — tinder, in a fire — to cabinets designed to protect against fire and water damage. When the fire was out, a preliminary examination showed that the cabinets had done their job. The collection was safe. Only materials that had not been processed and were outside the new cabinets sustained damage.

The new storage also had an assist from the Burlington Fire Department. Briefed on the importance of the collection inside, firefighters arriving on the scene entered the burning building to cover the cabinets with tarps in an effort to further protect the collection (pictured below). The fire was ignited by soldering work under way as part of renovations on the 1863 building.

“If we didn’t have the funding support from the National Science Foundation, which provided us full replacement of the old cabinets, the material would have been incinerated. We would have lost the whole thing,” says plant biologist Dave Barrington, curator of the Pringle Herbarium. “And we have to give credit to the firefighters because they made some excellent decisions.”

The herbarium contains specimens collected by botanists dating back to Fanny Allen, widow of Revolutionary War leader Ethan Allen. It’s named for Cyrus Pringle, a native of Charlotte, Vermont, who traveled to the western frontier in the late 1800s to discover new species, braving rugged terrain, malaria, and stage coach robbers to press, dry, and ship specimens to scientists in the east. By the end of his life, he had collected more than 500,000 specimens, 12 percent of which were entirely new to science.

The collection is critical for researchers studying plant diversity and systematics, or how living things evolve and change over time. “It’s a world-renowned resource,” Barrington says.

Two floors below, the Zadock Thompson Zoological Collections (which together with the herbarium comprise ��̽̽ Natural History Museum) were also safe from the flames and water. In total, Torrey Hall houses more than one million specimens.

The National Science Foundation grant, in addition to upgrading storage conditions for these important specimens, also provided funding to significantly expand digital imaging of the plant and animal collections, providing access to interested researchers around the globe. (Read about undergrad Gabriel Martin's work as part of that project.)

“Everything is coming out of the building,” says Barrington, who expects the specimens to move to Jeffords Hall. In the meantime, Janie Cohen, director of the Fleming Museum, has given the herbarium access to their large Marble Court to spread out damp specimen sheets, and staff from ��̽̽ Libraries have also jumped in. A team of experts will come in to figure out how to rescue the wet material.

“It’s amazing,” says Barrington. “It takes a village, and this is one hell of a village.”

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<p>“It takes a village, and this is one hell of a village.”</p>

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Built in 1863, Torrey Hall is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A four-alarm fire Aug. 3 dealt heavy damage to the building's roof. (Photo: Ryan Wiklund '15, ��̽̽ Rescue)

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Fire at Historic Torrey Hall

Anonymous — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 15:34:39 +0000

A fire is in progress at Torrey Hall on ��̽̽ campus. The fire has been contained, and the Burlington Fire Department is actively working to fully extinguish it. The fire began at 8:10 and was caused by the soldering of copper material on the roof as part of a renovation of the building taking place this summer.

No injuries have been reported.

The building houses two classrooms. No classes were being held in the building over the summer.

The Pringle Herbarium is housed in Torrey Hall, with two-thirds of the collection located on the third floor. With 300,000 samples, it is the third largest herbarium in New England and the largest Vermont flora collection in the world. The status of the collection is unknown at this point and it will not be possible to conduct a full assessment until after Burlington Fire Department releases the building.

The building also houses the Zadock Thompson Zoological Collection on the second floor. The status of this collection is also unknown.

Aside from the two classrooms, the building is used primarily for research by ��̽̽’s Biology Department and Plant Biology Department. The building contains offices for both departments. As a precaution, the university is beginning to work with academic deans and university’s Campus Planning Department to find alternative space for the building’s occupants.

Torrey Hall was built in 1863. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places.

UPDATE, 5 p.m.:

Following a preliminary examination of the interior of Torrey Hall, David Barrington, director of the Pringle Herbarium, has determined that the existing collection is largely intact. There is some damage to materials that had not yet been processed. There appears to be no damage to the Zadock Thompson animal collections.

The fire was declared under control early in the afternoon, and minimal Burlington Fire Department personnel remained on site monitoring the building for possible hot spots. The building will remain under a fire watch for the next 24 hours.

All surrounding buildings that had been previously evacuated have been re-occupied. Plans are being prepared for relocating the collections, and to begin the building restoration process.

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Torrey Hall. (Photo: Courtesy Pringle Herbarium)

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��̽̽ Snapshot: Gabriel Martin '18

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Aug 2017 19:11:36 +0000

In the fall of his freshman year, Gabriel Martin ‘18 was excited to learn about plants. “I just wanted to walk the woods and identify every plant I saw. And then I sat in my first systematics class and I thought: ‘well that's out the window.’ There’s a lot—a lot—to know.”

Three years later, he’s making progress. A plant biology major, Martin has a work-study job in ��̽̽’s Pringle Herbarium photographing and barcoding plants for the herbarium’s expanding online catalog. On this summer day, Martin is working with specimens from the geranium family, some of which were collected in Tunisia before the First World War. “I’m also a history minor,” he says, “It’s cool to connect the locations and times of the collection to world events.” He holds up one of the old sheets. “This is from 1910 and it makes me feel connected to that time.”

Martin has a growing interest in ethnobotany and the medical applications of plants. He’s considering going to graduate school to pursue a career in herbal medicine. He laughs and smiles at how far he has come. “At first I wasn't going to go to college. My guidance counselor kind of talked—really tricked—me into it,” he says. “Basically, my high school wouldn’t let me graduate unless I applied to college. So I was like ‘alright I guess I'll do it.’” Now he loves ��̽̽, he says, and credits his advisor, professor of plant biology Jeanne Harris, with guiding him well. “She always helps me out, makes sure I’m in the classes I need,” he says. “She’s an excellent teacher and all-around good person. If you’ve got a problem with Jeanne, you got a problem with me.”

Gabriel Martin places another dried geranium under the bright glare of a lightbox and snaps the camera. A high-resolution image appears on his computer screen and he turns to the next sheet. “I love to learn. And that’s a life-long commitment,” he says. “I can’t wait to be an old guy running around the woods, looking at plants. I’ll know a lot then, if not everything.”

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Martin photographs and catalogues geraniums in The Pringle Herbarium, which occupies 3,600 square feet on three floors of Joseph Torrey Hall. (Photos: Josh Brown)

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sgoodric — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 14:21:30 +0000

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Measuring Mansfield's Alpine Plants, One Square Meter at a Time

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