Abstract Field instruction is a crucial component of natural sciences education. The COVID‐19 pandemic has shifted many university courses to an online format, significantly impacting field instruction. FRST 350, Foundational Field School , is an 8‐day University of British Columbia Forestry field course taught to incoming transfer students from partner universities in China. In August 2020, I taught this course online to students studying remotely. In re‐developing the course, I spent 9 days in the field filming high definition (HD) video, 360° video, and 360° photography to best recreate the course in a short time‐frame. A 360° video records omnidirectionally, allowing viewers to “look around” in all directions, resulting in a highly immersive experience. Students expressed favorable opinions of the course, especially traditional HD and 360° video. Students generally preferred HD videos over 360°, though this was due mostly to the high bandwidth needed for 360° video and the fact that core course content was primarily conveyed as HD videos (in recognition of bandwidth challenges), with supplementary 360° videos. Students favorably noted the interactivity and immersive feel of 360° videos and photographs. This technology is financially and logistically feasible for use in a natural sciences course. Instructors engaged in online field instruction should weigh the strengths and weaknesses of various technologies, including 360° video, when determining how to best meet their learning objectives.
Abstract Plant identification is a critical skill for students in biological sciences, especially forestry. Many students begin with limited plant identification abilities and struggle to learn this skill. To support student learning of identification and ecological characteristics of important forest plants in an undergraduate forest ecology course at the University of British Columbia, I developed 53 videos, a companion website, and a dynamic quizzing system. The professionally produced, short videos each featured identification and ecological characteristics of a plant species, filmed in the field. The companion information website contained the embedded videos, botanical drawings, photographs, and general information for each species. The online, dynamic practice‐quizzing system allowed students to select which species they wanted to be quizzed on. Questions about those plants were then dynamically generated following several question templates, enabling students to take many practice quizzes with few or no repeated questions. Students were surveyed to gain insight into usage patterns and opinions of these resources. Student feedback was positive, and all three resources were heavily used. The videos are publicly available and have more than 43,000 views. Although this project required significant time and financial resources to produce, I found that field instruction can be supported by optional online resources that are both appreciated and heavily used by students.
Abstract Successful organic farming requires crop varieties that are resilient to environmental variability. Assessing variety performance across the range of conditions represented on working farms is vital to developing such varieties; however, data collected from on-farm, participatory trials can be difficult to both collect and interpret. To assess the utility of data arising from participatory trialing efforts, we examined the performance of butternut squash ( Cucurbita moschata L.), broccoli ( Brassica oleracea L.) and carrot ( Daucus carota L.) varieties grown in diverse organic production environments in participatory trials in Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin and New York using adaptability analysis (regression of variety means on environmental index). Patterns of adaptation varied across varieties, with some demonstrating broad adaptation and others showing specific adaptation to low- or high-yielding environments. Selection of varieties with broad vs specific adaptation should be guided by farmers’ risk tolerance and on-farm environmental variation. Adaptability analysis was appropriate for continuous variables (e.g., yield traits), but less so for ordinal variables and quality traits such as flavor and appearance, which can be vitally important in organic vegetable crop variety selection. The relative advantages of adaptability analysis and additive main effects and multiplicative interactions are also discussed in relation to on-farm trial networks. This work demonstrated the unique challenges presented by extensive participatory vegetable trialing efforts, which, as compared to grain crops, require novel approaches to facilitating farmer participation as well as data collection and analysis. Efficient, precise and reliable methods for evaluating quality related traits in these crops would allow researchers to assess stability and adaptation across a wider range of traits, providing advantages for effective plant breeding and trialing activities within the organic sector.
File List Wood_et_al_Supplement_1.csv (MD5: 94b61c2db193c757c75bc627e7c74f2f) Description BBS code, common, and scientific name of 360 bird species, from which we created twelve bird species groups. An X within a cell represents group membership of a species. We further categorized the twelve groups into three guilds for analysis purposes. The first eight groups, in darker shading, represent Species of Greatest Conservation Need within the identified regions. We refer to the grassland, shrubland, and woodland and forest groups as the land cover affiliates guild, and the last lighter shaded column represents the synanthropes guild.
Summary Biodiversity conservation is a primary function of protected areas. However, protected areas also attract people, and therefore, land use has intensified at the boundaries of these lands globally. In the USA , since the 1970s, housing growth at the boundaries (<1 km) of protected areas has increased at a rate far higher than on more distant private lands. Here, we designed our analyses to address our central hypothesis that increasing housing density in and near protected areas will increasingly alter their avian communities. We quantified the relationship between abundance and richness of protected‐area avian species of greatest conservation need, land‐cover affiliates (e.g. species associated with natural land cover such as forest breeders) and synanthropes (e.g. species associated with humans) with housing density on the boundary of protected areas and on more distant private lands from 1970 to 2010 in three ecoregions of the USA . We accomplished this using linear mixed‐model analyses, data from the US Census Bureau and 90 routes of the North American Breeding Bird Survey. Housing density at the boundary of protected areas tended to be strongly negatively related with the abundance and richness of species of greatest conservation need and land‐cover affiliates (upwards of 88% of variance explained) and strongly positively related with synanthropes (upwards of 83% of variance explained). The effect size of these relationships increased in most cases from 1970 to 2010 and was greatest in the densely developed eastern forests. In the more sparsely populated West, we found similar, though weaker, associations. Housing density on private lands more distant from protected areas had similar, but more muted negative effects. Synthesis and applications . Our results illustrate that as housing density has increased along the boundary of protected areas, the conservation benefit of these lands has likely diminished. We urge conservation planners to prioritize the purchase of private‐land inholdings in order to maximize the extent of unfragmented natural lands within protected areas. Further, we strongly recommend that land‐use planners implement boundary management strategies to alter the pattern of human access to protected areas, cluster development to concentrate the footprint of rural housing, and establish conservation agreements through local land trusts to buffer protected areas from the effects of development along protected‐area boundaries. To maximize the conservation benefit of protected areas, we suggest that housing development should be restricted within 1 km of their boundaries.
With limited resources for habitat conservation, the accurate identification of high-value avian habitat is crucial. Habitat structure affects avian biodiversity but is difficult to quantify over broad extents. Our goal was to identify which measures of vertical and horizontal habitat structure are most strongly related to patterns of avian biodiversity across the conterminous United States and to determine whether new measures of vertical structure are complementary to existing, primarily horizontal, measures. For 2,546 North American Breeding Bird Survey routes across the conterminous United States, we calculated canopy height and biomass from the National Biomass and Carbon Dataset (NBCD) as measures of vertical habitat structure and used land-cover composition and configuration metrics from the 2001 National Land Cover Database (NLCD) as measures of horizontal habitat structure. Avian species richness was calculated for each route for all birds and three habitat guilds. Avian species richness was significantly related to measures derived from both the NBCD and NLCD. The combination of horizontal and vertical habitat structure measures was most powerful, yielding high R2 values for nationwide models of forest (0.70) and grassland (0.48) bird species richness. New measures of vertical structure proved complementary to measures of horizontal structure. These data allow the efficient quantification of habitat structure over broad scales, thus informing better land management and bird conservation.
Background Quantifying changes in forest bird diversity is an essential task for developing effective conservation actions. When subtle changes in diversity accumulate over time, annual comparisons may offer an incomplete perspective of changes in diversity. In this case, progressive change, the comparison of changes in diversity from a baseline condition, may offer greater insight because changes in diversity are assessed over longer periods of times. Our objectives were to determine how forest bird diversity has changed over time and whether those changes were associated with forest disturbance. Methodology/Principal Findings We used North American Breeding Bird Survey data, a time series of Landsat images classified with respect to land cover change, and mixed-effects models to associate changes in forest bird community structure with forest disturbance, latitude, and longitude in the conterminous United States for the years 1985 to 2006. We document a significant divergence from the baseline structure for all birds of similar migratory habit and nest location, and all forest birds as a group from 1985 to 2006. Unexpectedly, decreases in progressive similarity resulted from small changes in richness (<1 species per route for the 22-year study period) and modest losses in abundance (−28.7–−10.2 individuals per route) that varied by migratory habit and nest location. Forest disturbance increased progressive similarity for Neotropical migrants, permanent residents, ground nesting, and cavity nesting species. We also documented highest progressive similarity in the eastern United States. Conclusions/Significance Contemporary forest bird community structure is changing rapidly over a relatively short period of time (e.g., ∼22 years). Forest disturbance and forest regeneration are primary factors associated with contemporary forest bird community structure, longitude and latitude are secondary factors, and forest loss is a tertiary factor. Importantly, these findings suggest some regions of the United States may already fall below the habitat amount threshold where fragmentation effects become important predictors of forest bird community structure.
