Publications by authors named "Russell N Spear"
Article Synopsis
- Streptomycin is used to manage fire blight in apple trees, but its environmental effects on soil bacteria are not well understood.
- Researchers studied the impact of streptomycin application on the bacterial communities in soil below both treated and untreated trees in an apple orchard over two years.
- Results showed no significant changes in bacterial community structure or diversity due to streptomycin use, indicating that its application has minimal immediate effects on soil bacteria in this agroecosystem.
The abundance of phylloplane microorganisms typically varies over several orders of magnitude among leaves sampled concurrently. Because the methods traditionally used to sample leaves are destructive, it has remained unclear whether this high variability is due to fixed differences in habitat quality among leaves or to asynchronous temporal variation in the microbial population density on individual leaves. We developed a novel semidestructive assay to repeatedly sample the same apple leaves from orchard trees over time by removing progressively more proximal approximately 1-cm-wide transverse segments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFColonization of apple leaves by the yeast-like fungus Aureobasidium pullulans was studied in the field on eight dates over 2 years. Population densities from adaxial leaf surfaces were approximately log10 0.5-2.
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