Scientific Stories, Frame by Frame: Using Sequential Art for Science Education

After years of disseminating his research findings by standard means (professional conferences, public outreach workshops, etc), Georgia Southern Geographer Dr. John Van Stan began to look for more efficient ways to connect his work to public interest. This link was found in sequential art. Zach S. Henderson is pleased to host Dr. Van Stan as he highlights the collaborative effort between a Forest Scientist and a Graphic Illustrator. Details of the step by step process, difficulties, rewards, and lessons learned will be brought to life with beautiful graphics. This program is for anyone with an interest in art, science, story-telling, comics, graphic novels, teaching with graphics, and collaboration across disciplines. Zach S. Henderson Library will provide light snacks and attendance verification to all participants, and also hold a drawing for copies of Van Stan’s printed Graphic Novel

The Cobra Lily\u27s Maze (and Minotaurs)

The leafy, nectary fangs of Darlingtonia californica (or the cobra lily) have attracted the attention of scientists and insects alike - feeding researchers juicy results but luring insects to a perilous plunge! Further information can be found in these references: How do pollinators not get eaten?? https://doi.org/10.3120/0024-9637-58.... Can microbial minotaurs give prey \u27the slip\u27? https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2016.0577 Do microbes help with digestion? https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2017.99 How do pitcher plants digest anyway? https://doi.org/10.1016/j.phytochem.2... What bugs live in the belly of this lily? https://doi.org/10.1093/aesa/83.2.189 More about the mite-ier minotaurs? https://www.researchgate.net/publicat... We\u27re grateful for the review by Dr. Aaron Ellison (https://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu... Video and sound editor: Vienna M. Cragin (https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeVX4MYB/) Script and narration: John Van Stan Music in this video Learn more Listen ad-free with YouTube Premium Song Too Crazy Artist David Fesliyan Licensed to YouTube by HAAWK for a 3rd Party (on behalf of Fesliyan Studios); LatinAutorPerf, HAAWK Publishing, UMPG Publishing, LatinAutor - PeerMusic, UNIAO BRASILEIRA DE EDITORAS DE MUSICA - UBEM, LatinAutor, and 5 Music Rights Societie

Precipitation Partitioning by Vegetation

Presented for European Geosciences Union Conference Briefly, we aim to discuss topics and questions raised by the recent book published under this presentation\u27s title. The book presents research on precipitation partitioning processes in vegetated ecosystems, putting them into a global context. It describes the processes by which meteoric water comes into contact with the vegetation\u27s canopy, typically the first surface contact of precipitation on land. It also discusses how precipitation partitioning by vegetation impacts the amount, patterning, and chemistry of water reaching the surface, as well as the amount and timing of evaporative return to the atmosphere. Although this process has been extensively studied, this is the first review of the global literature on the partitioning of precipitation by forests, shrubs, crops, grasslands and other less-studies plant type

Mistletoe: The Kiss of Death

Please, join us as we come face-to-leaf with a vampire of the plant kingdom: Mistletoe. This bloodsucker (well, sapsucker) may be a keystone parasite, eliminating trees unable to appease its appetite. Thereby, mistletoes may be able to engineer the structure of forests within their reach. So, are we at the forest floor simply the audience to a larger puppet show, where ecological interactions are plucks of haustorial puppet strings from some vampiric Geppetto hidden in the canopy above? Further information can be found in these references: Mistletoe, friend or foe? https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aa8fff A keystone parasite? https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2012.0856 Why is viscin so sticky? https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournal... Descriptions of mistletoe seeds in bird poop: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.flora.2012.... The biotech value of viscin? https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.16144 Want more mistletoe ecophysiology? https://doi.org/10.1139/B08-096 Illustration and video editing by Zachary O. Burch - Please check out his channel, Cecil Selwyn (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnYX...) We thank the peer reviews of: Dr. Sybil Gotsch (http://www.sybilgotsch.com/) Dr. Cameron Williams (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/...) Script, music and narration: John Van Stan Special thanks to Charles Peck for the mix! http://charlespeckmusic.com/ Thumbnail photograph: Invasion of the Harlequin Mistletoe by Boobook48 (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) https://bit.ly/3mHJcM

Welcome to Plant Brutality

plantBRUTALITY supports student research in plant science and collaborations with student artists to creatively communicate new scientific stories

Make Stemflow Unit-ed Again: An argument against funneling ratios

Based on J.T. Van Stan\u27s 2019 AGU presentation (H53M-1971): On the relevance of stemflow: An argument against funneling ratios and for a return to scaled flux-per-unit-area metrics. Abstract: From inside the stemflow research community, the past decade’s progress might look great: 1) the number of papers published on stemflow per year has doubled; 2) citations of stemflow publications have more than doubled; and 3) the number of research sites monitoring stemflow is on the rise. However, from a broader perspective, a brief Web of Science bibliometric analysis of the past decade reveals issues with these trends: 1) annual publication numbers have increased year-to-year for most topics in natural science, but stemflow publication trends are lower than related and broader disciplines; 2) self-citation is significantly higher for stemflow research than other disciplines (e.g., 26% compared to 2% for all hydrology); and, most importantly, 3) we may have more stemflow data, but we still lack a clear understanding of stemflow’s mechanistic importance. This creates ambiguities as to whether and how stemflow processes can be incorporated into hydrological models and concepts. In this presentation, I argue that we should progress from using metrics that are exclusively used by those who work on stemflow (e.g., unitless metrics such as funneling and enrichment ratios) towards using scaled flux-per-unit-area metrics that may support better integration into hydrological and ecological models (e.g., water or chemical yield per unit canopy area). While the magnitudes of funneling and enrichment ratios from individual plants have effectively conveyed to broader audiences the possibility for stemflow to play important roles in ecosystem functioning, I argue that we need to now move onto mechanistic investigations of stemflow’s impact on specific processes at ecohydrologically relevant scales. Dimensionless (often individual plant-scale) funneling-type metrics may not be useful in this regard, as they tell us nothing about where stemflow goes or what roles stemflow may play in the ecosystem. They also rely on an estimate of infiltration area, which has rarely been observed to date. Their use is further limited to falling liquid-phase rain, which prevents comparison of stemflow observations/processes under occult precipitation (fog, condensation) or mixed and solid-phase precipitation (snow, rime, etc

Early European Observations of Precipitation Partitioning by Vegetation: A Synthesis and Evaluation of 19th Century Findings

The first contact between precipitation and the land surface is often a plant canopy. The resulting precipitation partitioning by vegetation returns water back to the atmosphere (evaporation of intercepted precipitation) and redistributes water to the subcanopy surface as a “drip” flux (throughfall) and water that drains down plant stems (stemflow). Prior to the first benchmark publication of the field by Horton in 1919, European observatories and experimental stations had been observing precipitation partitioning since the mid-19th century. In this paper, we describe these early monitoring networks and studies of precipitation partitioning and show the impressive level of detail. Next to a description of the early studies, results included in this synthesis have been digitized and analyzed to compare them to recent studies. Although many early studies lack modern statistical analyses and monitoring tools that have become standard today, they had many strengths (not necessarily shared by every study, of course), including: A rigorous level of detail regarding stand characteristics (which is often lacking in modern ecohydrological studies); high-resolution spatiotemporal throughfall experiments; and chronosequential data collection and analysis. Moreover, these early studies reveal the roots of interest in precipitation partitioning processes and represent a generally forgotten piece of history shared by the hydrology, meteorology, forestry, and agricultural scientific communities. These studies are therefore relevant today and we hope modern scientists interested in plant-precipitation interactions will find new inspiration in our synthesis and evaluation of this literatur