In this study the researchers were looking into a type of biological phenomenon in southeast Asia called a general flowering or GF for short. They used most of the space in the journal article discussing the various theories as to why the even occurs in the way it does, as well as why the event doe not happen in other tropical areas around the world. GF is unique, because it can occur over thousands of miles and involve hundreds of plant species representing diverse families and lifeforms. It also involves strict mast fruiting. However, there is still plenty to be learned about this type of phenomena as was stated in the closing line of the abstract, “Long-term monitoring and further understanding of GF are essential for the conservation of this unique and diverse tropical forest in south-east Asia, especially in a period of global climatic change.” (Sakai, 2002)

The general flowering is a large synchronization of plants blooming, including trees, shrubs, and grasses. According to Sakai,  In seasonal environments, synchronization of reproduction among individuals occurs, in part, because a particular season is most favourable for reproduction and the survival of offspring. However, the extent of synchronization is usually much stronger than would be expected from the variability of climatic conditions. And is part of why the GF is such an interesting case, because it appears to happen in response to some combination of triggers, — like a shift in climate, but there is not enough research or knowledge to know what is causing it to happen in one specific area of the world. Though General flowering is a phenomenon unique to lowland dipterocarp forests. These forests are characterized by a high species diversity of trees. The detail that helps to separate the General flowering from other similar phenomena is that not only dipterocarp trees but also many other plant species show flowering patterns that are synchronized with the dipterocarp trees.

In this study Sakai summarizes the previous studies done on this subject and breaks down the findings into a language that is easier to understand as well as put their own research into to further prove what is known and help to explain why this is such an interesting and important phenomenon to study. There was not a clear problem or question that was being investigated in this article, though there were charts and new data used to support already existing hypotheses and show a newer audience what is known about the topic and what still needs to be done.

Sakai, Shoko. “General flowering in lowland mixed dipterocarp forests of South‐east Asia.” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 75.2 (2002): 233-247.

In this study a group of researchers were trying to find a mechanism or cause behind the effects of increased nitrogen disposition on fauna diversity. The researchers specified that  there had been plenty of studies done on correlational relationships between the N deposition and soil acidification and the growth of plants like algae, but there wasn’t very much on the mechanisms causing the changes in those ecosystems in any part of ecosystem ecology. But, even with their own evidence gathered from various effected an less effected areas of increased nitrogen, there was still not enough to come to a conclusion, so more studies will need to be conducted. Though they did find six mainly indirect bottlenecks that my be behind some of the mechanism behind the changes in the ecosystems due to increased nitrogen deposition.

The six bottlenecks discussed and investigated in the study were: chemical stress, a leveled and humid microclimate, decrease in reproductive habitat, changes in food plant quantity, changes in nutritional quality of food plants and changes in availability of prey or host species due to effects in the food web. The researchers found that depending on species and habitat type, different pathways play a dominant role and interference between different pathways can strengthen or weaken the net effect of Nitrogen deposition.

The research problem discussed in this piece of research was why the fauna were reacting to changes in Nitrogen deposition differently and what the driving force was. And which of the possible bottlenecks was the most prominent. The data type was most likely detached observation reports of past research on related or similar topics  Though this study did not include vary many tables or numbers for their paper, which could mean that the study was not as thorough as it could have been, but the researchers did say that  all bottlenecks were supported by peer reviewed literature, scientific evidence on the causal relationship between increased N deposition and effects on fauna in the complete causal chain was insufficient and that further research was needed. The biggest gap in knowledge  were about subtle changes in plant chemistry and changes in availability of prey and host species to higher trophic levels.

Nijssen, M. E., M. F. WallisDeVries, and H. Siepel. “Pathways for the effects of increased nitrogen deposition on fauna.” Biological Conservation(2017).

Lei Sun and other researchers took cloud samples from an area of high elevation in Southern China to examine the chemical characteristics. In total, 141 cloud samples were collected during 44 cloud events over the observation period. (Sun 2015) The primary acidifying factors were sulfate and nitrate, like the many other tests for acid rain though there were some neutralizing elements like calcium and ammonium. They also detected many other very dangerous chemicals in high concentrations in these samples like Pb, Ba, As, and Cr –lead, barium, arsenic, and chromium respectively. The overall pH level came out around 3.79. The variation in cloud chemistry indicated that temperature, sandstorms, and long-range transport could affect the concentrations of species and the lives of many people. (Sun 2015) The data collection method used in this study would have been detached observation of the rainwater and various cloud samples taken from the area of study. Then the researchers needed to compare those findings with measurements taken in other regions of China and east Asia in general. This group studied southern China because it has been identified as the third largest region to be experiencing acid rain pollution after Europe and North America. The research question for this topic was how the chemicals effect the make up of clouds and why acidic clouds behave differently from a more neutral one.

Sun, Lei, et al. “Evaluation of the Behavior of Clouds in a Region of SevereAcid Rain Pollution in Southern China: Species, Complexes, and Variations.” Environmental Science and Pollution Research 22.18 (2015): 14280-14290.

This proposal was made to the National Science Foundation Dissertation Development Grant Competition in 2002. This proposal seeks to learn about people’s reactions to levels of water scarcity in a community in Bolivia called Villa Israel. This proposal outlines five main research objectives: the first being to document the influence on this society in general which would involve the development and testing of a scale to measure water consumption, as well as conducting interviews to document the difference of water use in households. The second was to find out how a lack of water influences interactions in the same sample of homes over a nine-month period. The third research goal was to determine the amount of social exchanges between house holds, and if there is some kind of community norm for dealing with someone withdrawing from more frequent interactions. And the last goal was to determine if the withdrawals of the households from exchanges and social relationships because of the norms (if they are present).

The data types that would be used in this research are: cultural knowledge, behavior or reports of behavior,  and hidden social patterns, as well as some observational type data to measure the water levels. The data collection methods that would have been used to find the necessary data are sampling and choosing key informants so that the researcher can be sure that the sample households are being honest and not putting up a front that would prevent the study from getting necessary data. The researcher would conduct a measurement of water availability for each of the selected households being used in the study and for the community in general. In order to gain the opinion and knowledge based information she (the researcher) would conduct household interviews with each of the families. And the last data collection method proposed was an experimental game where,

“The game is an anonymous, one-time interaction between two people that uses real money. The player A is given a sum equal to one day’s labor, and the option to keep the money or send some of it to the player B. If the money is sent to player B, it triples and player B determines how much of the money should be returned to player A. The amount of money offered by player A indicates how much A trusts B, and the amount B returns to A is a measure of reciprocation”  (7, Wutich).

The analysis of this data would determine when and how social ties are effected when a vital recourse becomes scarce and how the people in the society have learned to cope with the challenges brought up. Three analysis methods used to compile and sort the data were : Data entry and coding, Inferential statistics and analysis of ethnographic data.

Wutich, Amber. “The Effects of Water Scarcity on Reciprocity and Sociability in Bolivia.”

In the article “Long-term changes in soil pH across major forest ecosystems in China” the researchers look at various samples and research some long term effects in the soils of the Chinese forests because of the heavy industrial pollution produced in the recent years. In order to do that they  examined temporal variations in topsoil pH and their relationships with atmospheric sulfur and nitrogen deposition across China’s forests from the 1980s to the 2000s. To accomplish this goal, the researchers conducted artificial neural network simulations using historical data from the 1980s and a data set from literature published after 2000. The abstract further summarized their results, saying that there is a definite  negative correlation between atmospheric sulfur and nitrogen deposition, further supporting the argument that there is a need for measures that reduce sulfur and nitrogen emissions so as to maintain ecosystem structure and function in forests and any other ecosystem that may be effected.

The purpose of this study was to better our understanding of the effect of acidic deposition on soil pH, especially in China’s. It is generally well known that the effect of acidic deposition on soil pH is not very good for most plants and the animals that relay on them.  The data used in this study was mostly historical and various reports on how what was emitted and where and then experiments on different soils from the soils all collected together and ran through a satirical analysis software to look for a correlation that came out to be quite strong and in support of their hypothesis that there was a lot of harmful sulfur and nitrogen polluting and damaging the ecosystems.

To gather the data the researchers had to use both detached observations and various records that had been put together in previous years. I think this was a fairly useful study and incredibly important when trying to prove that there is an environmental issue present to be addressed. The only issue is their data for the historical soils is somewhat old, but that is a fairly minor issue.

Yang, Y., Li, P., He, H., Zhao, X., Datta, A., Ma, W., Zhang, Y., Liu, X., Han, W., Wilson, M. C. and Fang, J. (2015), Long-term changes in soil pH across major forest ecosystems in China. Geophys. Res. Lett., 42: 933–940. doi: 10.1002/2014GL062575.

Simulated seasonal variations in nitrogen wet deposition over East Asia was written by Jin-Hui Yu, Mel-Gen Zhang and Jia-Linv Li. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/16742834.2015.1136782 

The purpose of this study was to simulate the rain fall patterns in China and to measure where the most nitrogen and sulfur pollutants were falling though out the country and see if there was a difference depending on what season it is. In this study the researchers focused more in the amount of nitrogen wet amounts, which refers to the amount of nitrogen in precipitation like rain or snow. In order to be able to observe this the researchers applied the regional air quality modeling system Regional Atmospheric Modeling System–Community Multiscale Air Quality to estimate the spatial distribution and seasonal variation in nitrogen wet deposition over East Asia, though the article tends to concentrate more on China. “The simulated results were evaluated by comparing modeled precipitation rates and ion concentrations, such as ammonium , nitrate, and sulfate, in rainwater, against observations obtained from Acid Deposition Monitoring Network in East Asia and [weather stations] in China” (Jin-Hui Yu, Zhang, Li).

Once they had collected the data the researchers compared their modeled data to what they observed using the weather station and found that modeling system reproduces fairly accurate seasonal precipitation patterns.  Analysis of the modeled wet deposition distributions indicated that China experiences noticeable variation in wet deposition patterns throughout the year.

This study was conduced because even though many nitrogen deposition measurement programs have been launched in China since the 1980s the fluxes in nitrogen wet deposition were calculated only by using a few sites. A systematic nationwide monitoring network to obtain nitrogen deposition distribution data is absent in China, leading to insufficient information on regional-scale nitrogen deposition. These measurements were much fewer than those of the United States and most European countries so these researchers sought to try and fix this issue but doing a more accurate and modern measurement.

The type of data used to learn how much variation there was between a model and observed rain fall was through a report of and act and an actually action taken, which was to go to a weather station and observe the amounts of nitrogen in that rain. This research would be useful to see how various air currents effect the amounts of acid rain around the country and to better understand how much of the unnaturally present nitrogen in the surrounding countries is actually from China and not a product of their own actions. This could also be useful to compare with older data around similar topics to see if there is a correlation between them.

Yu, Jin-Hai, Mei-Gen Zhang, and Jia-Lin Li. “Simulated Seasonal Variations in Nitrogen Wet Deposition over East Asia.” Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters 9.2 (2016): 99-106. Web.

This article was titled “Genetic consequences of historical anthropogenic and ecological events on giant pandas,” and was written by multiple  contributors because of the project’s focus. This research was conducted because of the growing concern about the Giant pandas’ ability to adapt to the changing climate due to its increasing habitat loss, poaching, and other issues like that.  In this article the researchers focus more on two of the main wild panda populations, the Qionaglai and the Minshan.

There were two main areas that the article focused on– one of which is lesser known. The two areas were the consequences of bamboo flowering and the exact populations where the poaching and removal from the wild are currently taking place. Though according to the research results that the team put together, the panda populations are actually fairly healthy genetically speaking with only a little bit of evidence for bottlenecking in the Qionaglai population of pandas, but that was found in both historical and modern samples which showed a long-term decline (several thousand years) not short-term. Though at the end of the article they made sure to warn that even though pandas do seem to have a fairly bright future now, it is only because of the conservation efforts taken and laws passed by China. Bamboo flowering is a bad for the pandas because after the flowering occurs, the plants die off in 40-100 year intervals and directly reduce food availability.

The main question this article seems to be answering is whether the historical data on the current population and genetic health of giant pandas is correct or if there is currently a distinct loss of genetic diversity in the near future.

In conducting this study the researchers had to gather data for both historical data and current data for their focus groups — the two panda populations. For the historical data they collected skins from institutions and agencies across china, and the deaths of those pandas was contributed to starvation due to bamboo flowering during the 1970s and 1980s or poaching during the 1950’s and 1988 when China  enacted a wildlife protection act. They also collected blood, fur, and feces from multiple individuals whom were either wild or wild, but in captivity and awaiting release. So the majority of the data used was observatory in form.

Zhu, Lifeng, Yibo Hu, Dunwu Qi, Hua Wu, Xiangjiang Zhan, Zhejun Zhang, Michael W. Bruford, Jinliang Wang, Xuyu Yang, Xiaodong Gu, Lei Zhang, Baowei Zhang, Shanning Zhang, and Fuwen Wei. “Genetic consequences of historical anthropogenic and ecological events on giant pandas.” Ecology 94.10 (2013): 2346-357. text.

The article I found is called “Engaging in Birds in Vegetation Restoration after Elwha Dam Removal” published in Ecological Restoration March 2013, written by John F. McLaughlin. This article was centered around the restoration of native plant species by using birds in what used to be Lake Mills reservoir in Olympia National Park. McLaughlin was interested in finding out if it would be possible to use birds as a way to distribute seeds from native plants and disperse them fairly reliably in the sediment without introducing the invasive species as well. In order to complete this research, he had to go to the area and observe samples of bird scat and see how much was in proximity to the lake area and observe the behaviors and flight patters of the birds in the area. In the end McLaughlin found that there were three main bird species that met all of his criteria, though he focused exclusively on the American Robin as it apparently contributed the most as its diet is mostly made up of fruit and other related types of food.

However he did have some limitations in this study for example: he did not identify the source of the various bird scat observed nor did he measure the seed content in the samples.  He was also fairly selective in where he conducted his observations as most of the data came from exposed sediments and it is possible that the scat deposition may be different in the lower reservoir as the material in that area had been subjected much longer than where this study happened.  

I think this study could be very useful in for future reference if there when there is another decision to remove dams. I also find it interesting that when given an option that birds are more likely to disperse seeds from native plants. Though I suppose that would be expected if the native plant is what that species of bird evolved to eat. I do wonder if the same method of dispersal could be used to help with repairing forests that have been damaged due to deforestation or other types of habitats like a swamp or marsh land.

Mclaughlin, John F. “Engaging Birds in Vegetation Restoration after Elwha Dam Removal.” Ecological Restoration 31.1 (2013): 46-56. print.