Kevin Price, B.A. - US grants

Geographic information systems (GIS) is an area of study causing increased excitement among students. This project, therefore, strives to enhance this area of geography by accomplishing specific objectives to improve the curriculum. New undergraduate courses, internships, and programs are being added, and a specific plan has been developed for enhancing four analytical geography courses. This plan also involves redesigning courses, updating laboratory computing and digital data analysis equipment, and redesigning laboratory exercises to incorporate the use of new analytical capabilities. It is also expected that the physical geography curriculum will be improved by incorporating modern image display and geographic information analysis capabilities into existing laboratory and field exercises.

9308065
Holt

A long-term experiment on habitat fragmentation is underway in the prairie-forest ecotone in eastern Kansas. An archipelago of patches, representing different levels of fragmentation, was arrayed within a period 6 years. During the first six years of the study, fragmentation influenced consumer population dynamics, and the local persistence of herbaceous plant species with clonal life cycles, but did not affect measures of local species richness or the overall rates of succession. It is expected that during the next five, substantial effects of fragmentation upon successional dynamics should begin to appear, because: 1) there is a transition underway from species present in the original seed pool to species colonizing form external source pools, particularly trees and shrubs, and 2) the stature of the dominant plants is increasing, thereby enhancing microenvironmental differences between patch interiors and the surrounding interstitial habitats and hence edge effects. It is also expected that small mammal may be dominant driving factors in woody species establishment, and so fragmentation effects observed in plant succession may be indirect manifestations of fragmentation effects on the small mammal community. This project will document dynamics in plant community composition, local persistence, and plant architecture as a function of the degree of fragmentation, using both ground surveys, canopy analysis technology, aerial photography, and remote sensing. It will also monitor the spatial distributions of small mammals that are potentially important in slowing the invasion of woody species, and to use exclosures to directly measure effects on seedling survivorship. This study is one of the very few experimental studies of habitat fragmentation, and provides a system for exploring more general issue of scale in ecological dynamics.

Research projects such as this are fundamental to the better understanding of the associative processes that occur within communities. This understanding will provide a knowledge base on what to expect as landscapes are more finely fragmented. It may also suggest ameliorative measures for maintaining system integrity.

The Kansas Ecolgical Reserves (KER) includes a wide variety of managed natural and experimental areas in the tallgrass prairie-eastern deciduous forest ecotone. Recently ecological research at KER has grown to include a diverse assemblage of individual and collaborative research efforts with a trend toward developing long-term projects and experimentally manipulated ecosystems, both terrestrial and aquatic. Development was assisted by funds from institutional, private, and federal sources. This project will enhance research facilities in three ways: (1) to install a surveyed field grid for georeferencing study sites and field research facilities throughout KER, (2) to expand the database management system and GIS by adding key equipment, such as a UNIX workstation, software, etc., and by establishing a set of core map coverages, and (3) construction of a lath house that will be used for plant population and aquatic studies. The enhancement will supportvongoing research programs, make the field station more attractive for outside investigators, and foster research aimed at larger spatial and temporal scales.

Peterson 97-11621 Studies of the Magnitude of climate changes expected resulting from buildup of atmospheric CO2 are predicted to affect many facets of the Earth's environments, although the magnitude of many of these effects is unknown. This study aims to integrate data bases regarding the biodiversity of Mexico, thematic geographic data, up-to-date information from satellite imagery, and simple models of global climate change into a series of predictions of the effects of these changes on species of birds, mammals, and butterflies in the region, a first assessment of the biodiversity consequences of global climate change. Multi-seasonal analysis of Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer imagery will be used to produce a detailed region wide vegetation map, which will be combined with existing environmental maps and data bases to characterize habitat types. Simple models of the effects of elevated C02 and other agents of climate change will be used to mimic future shifts in distribution and extent of vegetation types and habitats. Geographic distributions of individual species will be predicted based on characteristics of sites of known occurrence; based on the future-shift models developed from climate change projections, species' future distributions will be modeled, and extinction's and colonization inferred. The overall result will be an assessment of the biodiversity consequences of anticipated climate change over the next several decades or centuries in Mexico, as well as the development of several methods and models that will be useful to other investigators interested in similar and related issues.

The goal of the collaborative research is to distinguish between the impact of climate and land use on ecosystem functioning for eastern Asian steppes. This may be possible because, while contiguous regions of Inner Mongolia and Mongolia have very similar climates, land use practices can different dramatically. The PIs will determine how much of when 'green-up' occurs is a function of climate and how much is a function of land use. The proposed work builds on research recently conducted by the authors. A rich mix of research techniques including remote sensing, modeling, field studies and statistical analyses will be used. The work is important because it will lead to better understanding of land-surface interactions and vegetation feedbacks in East Asia.

PI: Jesse Poland (Kansas State University/USDA-ARS)

Co-PIs: Kevin Price (Kansas State University)

Collaborators: Michael Gore, Andrew French, Kelly Thorp, Jeff White (USDA-ARS); Pedro Andrade-Sanchez (University of Arizona); Allan Fritz, Randy Price, William Schapaugh, Stephen Welch, Naiqian Zhang (Kansas State University)

The essence of plant biology is to understand the link between genetic variation and observed phenotypes. While genotyping can now be accomplished with low-cost, next-generation sequencing technologies, phenotyping is labor intensive and has become the limiting factor in plant biology studies and crop improvement programs. This project will develop transformational capacity for field-based high throughput phenotyping (HTP) by creating platforms for rapid assessment of multiple quantitative plant traits. Proximal sensing tools and GPS referencing will be integrated to develop mobile platforms that are low-cost, flexible, robust, and amenable for a range of species. A central premise of this work is that integrating streams of data from multiple types of sensors will increase both the accuracy and number of traits that can be quantified for field grown plants. Thus, a second objective is to develop novel algorithms for analyzing HTP data to quantitatively estimate phenotypes expressed in field environments. The newly developed sensor systems, indexes, and algorithms will be applied in test cases that examine multiple quantitative traits in wheat, soybean and cotton.

The development of HTP platforms will complement the explosion of genomic information currently being collected and will enable field level experimental biology on a scale that has not been previously possible. Because the focus of this project is on field-based assessment of economically important crop species that represent different plant types and production systems, the platform and analytic methods developed in this project are expected to have broad application to a range of target environments and species and allow scalability for larger studies. The tools and methods developed will be transferred to the scientific community through hands-on training workshops. Training materials, equipment designs and software will be publicly available through a project website. This project will provide training for graduate and postgraduate scholars while hosting multiple internships for undergraduate engineering and plant science students in the field of HTP.