New York State Climate Impacts Assessment Chapter 05: Ecosystems.

The people of New York have long benefited from the state's diversity of ecosystems, which range from coastal shorelines and wetlands to extensive forests and mountaintop alpine habitat, and from lakes and rivers to greenspaces in heavily populated urban areas. These ecosystems provide key services such as food, water, forest products, flood prevention, carbon storage, climate moderation, recreational opportunities, and other cultural services. This chapter examines how changes in climatic conditions across the state are affecting different types of ecosystems and the services they provide, and considers likely future impacts of projected climate change.

A long-term evaluation of applied nucleation as a strategy to facilitate forest restoration.

Applied nucleation is a restoration technique that seeks to facilitate woody-plant establishment by attracting birds or other animals that may introduce seeds of dispersal-limited species. In 1991, an experimental test of applied nucleation was initiated in an abandoned landfill in New Jersey, USA. Trees and shrubs were planted into 16 10 x 10 m plots, covering < 3% of the 6-ha site.

Extinction, turnover and species diversity in an experimentally fragmented California annual grassland.

Many natural populations are subdivided among partially isolated habitat patches, but the influence of habitat patchiness per se on species immigration, extinction, and the resulting patterns of species diversity, has received virtually no experimental study. In an experiment designed to test the effects of habitat subdivision on local community structure, we compare the diversity and annual turnover of flowering plant species in 3 treatments of the same total area, but subdivided to different degrees. We experimentally fragmented a California winter annual grassland into isolated plots, two of 32 m, eight of 8 m, and 32 of 2 m, each treatment representing a combined area of 64 m.