Deforestation remains a serious concern in the Brazilian Amazon, but new MSU-led research suggests that the rainforest there is hardier than commonly thought.

Critics have predicted that if 30 or 40 percent of the country’s forestland were cut, the cycle in which trees move moisture from the soil to the atmosphere could be severely disrupted, stunting rainfall and turning the region into a desert.

But a new study led by ESPP affiliate Robert Walker (Geography) found that, as long as the forests already protected by the Brazilian government remain intact, that tipping point will be avoided.

The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Joining Walker on the research team were ESPP affiliates Nathan Moore and Cynthia Simmons, and doctoral student Dante Vergara, all in the Department of Geography.

The researchers used computer models to simulate the effects of a worst-case scenario, in which all but the preserved forests were cut.  Faced even with such widespread deforestation, they found, rainfall in the region would not decrease enough to disrupt ecosystems.

To read more about the research, and watch a video interview with Walker, visit the MSU News site.

-Andy McGlashen

Experts gathered last week at MSU’s Kellogg Biological Station to discuss their work in the emerging field of biogeochemistry, which concerns the intersection of biology, geology and chemistry, and asks how organisms interact with their physical and chemical environments.

Roughly 80 participants from all over the Upper Midwest attended the first annual Great Lakes Regional Biogeochemistry Symposium, which was hosted by KBS’s Eminent Ecologists program and the Biogeochemistry Environmental Research Initiative (BERI).

“We were very happy with how it turned out,” said Sam Rossman, a zoology graduate student who organized the event.  “Getting people together and forming a more unified group of biogeochemists in the Midwest was really valuable.”

MSU faculty and students made up a large bloc of the presenters, with papers on harmful algae blooms, the storage of phosphorous in wetlands, the life history and behavior of bottlenose dolphins, the environmental recovery of inland lakes and several other topics.  The diversity of their expertise reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the field, and getting people with such varied interests in the same room to share ideas is important, Rossman said.

I spoke with Nathaniel Ostrom, an ESPP affiliate and co-director of the BERI, about the important questions biogeochemists are interested in, and why the field matters.  A video of that interview is below.

-Andy McGlashen

It’s been a half-century since President Eisenhower and Queen Elizabeth II christened  the Great Lakes-Saint Lawrence Seaway, allowing international shipping traffic to reach more than 2,000 miles to the grain- and ore-laden ports of the Great Lakes.

Michigan State University Press has marked the anniversary by publishing Pandora’s Locks: The Opening of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway by Jeff Alexander, a veteran environment reporter who recently left the Muskegon Chronicle to work for the National Wildlife Federation.

Alexander tells the story of how government mismanagement made an engineering marvel into a highway for invaders like the zebra mussel, sea lamprey and round goby, turning what many considered a fountain of economic development into a quagmire of ecological devastation whose costs outweigh its benefits.

I’ve written more extensively about the book elsewhere, and so have others, so I won’t go into detail here, but I thought GreenBoard readers would be interested in it not only because of its important topic, but because a couple of ESPP’s affiliated faculty are quoted in its pages; William Taylor spoke with Alexander about the economic boost that followed the introduction of Pacific salmon into the lakes, and Orlando Sarnelle told the writer about the link between zebra mussels and toxic blue-green algae (based on research he conducted at Kellogg Biological Station).

Pandora’s Locks is now available, and is an excellent one-stop history of the long and seemingly endless biologic invasion of the Great Lakes.

-Andy McGlashen