Researching Plant Growth in Amended Martian Regolith Simulant, Photosynthetic Rates of Plants, Seed Surface Decontamination by Plasma Methods, New Crop Development, and Porous Concrete Media

Plant growth research for food production at Kennedy Space Center looks at how future residents of Mars and the Moon will enjoy the sight, smell, taste, and nutrition of plants. Overall, the goal is to provide a sustainable source of healthy food, on long-duration space flights, so astronauts can get the nutrition they need and produce food. The sustainable production of food will aid in the efforts of closed life support. Plants have a vital application for bio regenerative life support as demands for food and oxygen can be provided through photosynthesis, while the carbon dioxide from human respiration is removed. Transpiration is also used in life support processes as waste water that can be recycled through plant systems with the resultant humidity then condensed as clean water. Selected crops will provide the nutrient requirements needed for long duration space flight. Currently, projects in food production are investigating how plants grow in Martian regolith simulant, new crops testing with tomato and pepper cultivars, acquiring real-time photosynthetic data on crops, assessing plant growth in porous concrete media, and the use of plasma for surface decontamination of seeds

Increasing Resistance and Reducing Vulnerability to Invasive Species at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore

Invasive plant species pose a significant threat to long-term ecosystem health, especially as new invasives continue to arise. Current invasive management strategies mainly focus on reducing or eliminating single species through chemical and physical removal methods. However, these reactive approaches are often costly, time intensive, and lack long-term success. Many practitioners are increasingly interested in a preemptive, resistance-based approach to management that focuses on actively reducing an ecosystem’s vulnerability to invasion. Such an approach allows practitioners to address multiple invasives at once, increasing the efficiency, costeffectiveness, and overall sustainability of managing invasive species. We aimed to meet the widespread need for improved understanding and ability to implement this alternative systemsbased management approach, specifically as it applies to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (SBDNL). We used three main sources to inform our recommendations: 1) review of current research on resistance and vulnerability to invasion, 2) analysis of existing monitoring and spatial data at SBDNL related to vulnerability, and 3) perspectives and experiences of on the ground practitioners.Master of ScienceSchool for Environment and SustainabilityUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/167363/3/IncreasingResistancetoInvasiveSpecies_376.pd

Influence of Substratum Hydrophobicity on the Geomicrobiology of River Biofilm Architecture and Ecology Analyzed by CMEIAS Bioimage Informatics

Microbial biogeography in terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems is mainly dominated by community biofilm lifestyles. Here, we describe applications of computer-assisted microscopy using CMEIAS (Center for Microbial Ecology Image Analysis System) bioimage informatics software for a comprehensive analysis of river biofilm architectures and ecology. Natural biofilms were developed for four summer days on microscope slides of plain borosilicate glass and transparent polystyrene submerged in the Red Cedar River that flows through the Michigan State University campus. Images of the biofilm communities were acquired using brightfield and phase-contrast microscopy at spatial resolutions revealing details of microcolonies and individual cells, then digitally segmented to the foreground objects of interest. Phenotypic features of their size, abundance, surface texture, contour morphology, fractal geometry, ecophysiology, and landscape/spatial ecology were digitally extracted and evaluated by many discriminating statistical tests. The results indicate that river biofilm architecture exhibits significant geospatial structure in situ, providing many insights on the strong influence that substratum hydrophobicity–wettability exert on biofilm development and ecology, including their productivity and colonization intensity, morphological diversity/dominance/conditional rarity, nutrient apportionment/uptake efficiency/utilization, allometry/metabolic activity, responses to starvation and bacteriovory stresses, spatial patterns of distribution/dispersion/connectivity, and interpolated autocorrelations of cooperative/conflicting cell–cell interactions at real-world spatial scales directly relevant to their ecological niches. The significant impact of substratum physicochemistry was revealed for biofilms during their early immature stage of development in the river ecosystem. Bioimage informatics can fill major gaps in understanding the geomicrobiology and microbial ecology of biofilms in situ when examined at spatial scales suitable for phenotypic analysis at microcolony and single-cell resolutions