Our newest paper just became available in Annals of Forest Science. We used data from over 250 rowans growing in Carpathian mountains in Poland and investigated the predictions of the Terminal Investment Hypothesis, which suggests that organisms should invest disproportionally into reproduction preceding their death. We found no support. Rather, seed production declined significantly before…
Category: research
Mast-Net funded! Global masting collaboration
Our proposal “MAST-NET: masting responses to climate change and impacts on ecosystems” submitted a few months ago to the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) in the UK just received a recommendation for funding. The project is for an international collaboration focused on assembling global masting datasets, and then using them to answer the whole bunch of…
New Journal of Ecology paper: Apparent predation slows down invasion of red oak in Europe
Accepted! Yesterday, we’ve got an acceptation letter from Journal of Ecology for a paper I co-wrote with Nathanael Lichti and Rafał Zwolak, entitled “Consumer-mediated indirect interaction with a native plant lowers the fitness of an invasive competitor”. The paper describes an experiment I did two summers ago. We tracked red oak (Quercus rubra) and sessile…
New Phytologist paper on veto in masting is out
Variable, synchronized seed production, called masting, is a widespread reproductive strategy in plants. Numerous ideas were proposed to explain this bizarre reproductive behavior of trees, but there is no consensus how the synchrony among individual plants happen. In the recent study, we explored the environmental veto hypothesis, which assumes that reproductive synchrony is driven by…
Extremadura field season about to start
Last week, we arrived at the University of Extremadura, at Raul Bonal lab. We are about to start the pollen addition experiments, testing the density-dependence and synchrony-dependence of pollination efficiency in Quercus ilex. This is financed by the grant I recently got, and this post explains more about the research. Meanwhile, we are enjoying the beautiful…
Our new masting paper in New Phytologist
Today, we’ve got the acceptation letter from New Phytologist! Good day to start a new week 🙂 In the paper, we first added ‘complete reproductive failure ‘ (or veto) as an additional parameter the to resource budget model. This new parameter describes the situation in which all plants within population experience failure (they do not…
Red oaks escape insect predation in their invasive range
In our recently published paper, we showed that red oaks escape seed predation by weevils (Curculio spp.) in their invasive range. Compared to native oaks, and to red oaks in the USA, the rate of infestation was 10-times lower in red oaks in Poland. What is more, once weevils infest red oaks in Europe, the…
Pollination efficiecny and drought in masting: new study in Proceedings of Royal Society B
During my recent research stay at CREAF in Barcelona, I was analysing long-time data series of seed production of Quercus ilex, an evergreen oak species widespread in Spain. We were testing several recent hypotheses linking weather variation and seed production and found a lot of interesting trends. Our story was just accepted in the oldest…
Large grant: role of pollen limitation in masting
I just received large grant from Polish National Science Foundation (over 100 000 euro) to run some cool masting experiments 😉 We will experimentally evaluate the role pollen limitation as a synchronizing factor in masting of oaks. We are going to test both density-dependence of pollen limitation, as well as phenology-dependence of it (see e.g….
Interview on masting and Lyme disease in Wyborcza
Few weeks ago I talked with Margit Kossobudzka about our research on mast seeding and Lyme disease. The interview is now published in Wyborcza (national-wide polish newspaper), and you can read it under this link. Enjoy! 🙂 You can also check the older posts about this work, e.g. here. And, of course, the original scientific paper here!…
New Scientist on our Lyme disease research!
In the April issue of New Scientist Chelsea Whyte write about the relationship between oak mast seeding, tick and rodent populations, and Lyme boreliosis risk in humans. The article is, of course, heavily based on the work of Richard Ostfeld lab, but they mention also our recent work. You can read the original story in the…
Journal of Ecology paper on oak reproduction assigned to March issue
The paper that was accepted in the journal last year is now assigned to March issue 🙂 I wrote a short summary of the research for Journal of Ecology blog, and for UAM website (both in Polish and English). Hope you will like it!
Michal Bogdziewicz, PhD 