From the University of Central Florida
Climate change models could have a thing or two to learn from termites and fungi, according to a new study released this week.
For a long time scientists have believed that temperature is the dominant factor in determining the rate of wood decomposition worldwide. Decomposition matters because the speed at which woody material are broken down strongly influences the retention of carbon in forest ecosystems and can help to offset the loss of carbon to the atmosphere from other sources. That makes the decomposition rate a key factor in detecting potential changes to the climate.
But scientists from Yale, the University of Central Florida and SUNY Buffalo State found that fungi and termites, which help break down wood, may play a more significant role in the rate of decomposition than temperature alone.
The group’s findings appear in this week’s edition of the journal Nature Climate Change.
“The big surprise of this work was the realization that the impact of organisms surpassed climate as a control of decomposition across spatial scales,” said Joshua King, a biologist at UCF and co-author of the paper. “Understanding the ecology and biology of fungi and termites is a key to understanding how the rate of decomposition will vary from place to place.”
So how did scientists originally come up with temperature as the main factor in decomposition? It has to do with data and math. Scientists most often construct a model based on the average decomposition rates of sites that are in close proximity to each other. In this case, it appears that each local number matter because they reflect the activity of fungi and termites. The team suggests that scientists need to embrace the variability found across data collected from many different sites instead of averaging it all together to create better models with more accurate predictions.
The team reached this conclusion after running a 13-month experiment. They distributed 160 blocks of pine tree wood across five sub-regions of temperate forest in the eastern U.S. — from Connecticut to northern Florida — and then monitored the decay that occurred.
They selected similar forest types, hardwood deciduous forests, to focus on major differences in climate across the regional gradient. (The average annual temperature in southern New England is about 11 degrees Celsius cooler than Florida.) Within each of the five sub-regions they placed the wood blocks in different types of terrain to evaluate the effects of local versus regional factors as controls on decomposition.
“Most people would try to make sure everything was as standard as possible,” said Mark A. Bradford, an assistant professor of terrestrial ecosystem ecology at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES) and lead author of the study. “We said, ‘Well, let’s generate as much variation as possible.’ So we put some blocks on south-facing slopes, where they would be warmer in the summer, and others on north-facing slopes where it’s colder. We put some on top of ridges and others next to streams where it was wetter.”
After 13 months, they measured how much wood had been lost, whether to the consumption of fungi growing on the wood or to termites consuming the wood.
According to their analysis, local-scale factors explained about three quarters of the variation in wood decomposition, while climate explained only about one quarter, contrary to the expectation that climate should be the predominant control.
“We’re reaching the wrong conclusion about the major controls on decomposition because of the way we’ve traditionally collected and looked at our data,” Bradford said. “That in turn will weaken the effectiveness of climate prediction.”
The team’s recommendation: collect more data at local sites and improve our understanding of how local conditions affect the organisms that drive decomposition, because they could significantly improve the effectiveness of climate change projections.
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Co-authors of the study include: Robert J. Warren II from SUNY Buffalo State; Petr Baldrian from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic; Thomas W. Crowther, Daniel S. Maynard and Emily E. Oldfield from Yale; William R. Wieder, from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO and Stephen A. Wood from Columbia University.
The National Science Foundation and Yale Climate & Energy Institute funded the research.
David Riser
I don’t know where you get your information. Termites do not exist in Minnesota, North Dakota and or Montana, there may be some in very southern Minnesota but where the forest exist in Minnesota they do not. As a life long resident of Minnesota and North Dakota home inspection never requires a termite inspection, they simple do not exist, I assume that a frost line of over 48 inches deep prohibits [their] existence as side note last winter Fargo’s frost line exceeded six foot a lack of snow and cold temperatures cause people water lines to freeze even most are at least six feet down.. Now I live in Arizona and yes home inspection do require a termite inspection. As to rotting wood the determine factor is the amount of moisture the wetter is is the quicker it deteriorates, a hot dry summer not so much a hot wet summer a lot. Any home owner should know that moisture is the enemy of wood, rot does not occur in a home normally unless moisture is present. That why a broken windows are fatal to an abandon or vacant house. Termites might exist here in Arizona but the fuels load up on the rim can only be controlled but fire that is true for almost all of the Ponderosa pine forest through out the west, there not enough moisture even for termites, Termites need moisture here in the valley that is the one sure way to attract termites, moisture and wood. Not just wood alone. Again this story points out how our agents of smart are so smart, unfortunately that seem to be rampant through out academia. Any
So Mark, got to say you must have never purchased a house while you lived in those states. The permafrost line is in Canada almost 500 miles north of the border and strangely you can get termite service in Fargo ND, just like every other major city in the continental US and Hawaii. I will say that there is an urban legend about termites in the north, unfortunately quite a few folks have learned that the hard way. Check out this Real Estate blog from St Paul… http://www.stpaulrealestateblog.com/2006/08/termites_no_way.html
v/r,
David Riser
Termites do not exist in Minnesota, North Dakota and or Montana
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The termites would argue with you if they could talk. There are a number of termite species recorded from Montana. Like this one:
“Zootermopsis angusticollis – Most are found in the states of California, Oregon, Washington, Montana and in southern British Columbia.”
Or this one: “The Nevada Dampwood Termite (Zootermopsis nevadensis) is found in the mountain basins of Nevada, Idaho and Montana.”
Or this one: “The eastern subterranean termite (Reticulitermes flavipes) is found in three-quarters of the continental United States. It can be found from Maine to Florida and from Montana to the Gulf Coast in Texas.”
In fact, it is trivial to find records of termites in Montana. Boink !!
CRS, DrPH says:
June 6, 2014 at 9:49 pm
“They then estimated the bugs produced 150 million metric tons of methane a year world-wide, but said the estimate could be off by 50% either way“.
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Move those error bars out to 100% and they could get a job with the IPCC.
ferdberple says:
June 6, 2014 at 9:06 pm
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Edward Deming taught this. That variance, not average is what must be measured. Ignored by America he went to Japan. The death of the American car industry. 100 thousand abandoned houses and factories abandoned in Detroit is the result.
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While quality issues were certainly a contributing factor to the the car industry issues, Detroit’s problems go much deeper, straight to it’s leadership, the voters of that leadership, and the decisions of people the leadership hires.
A city doesn’t go from having the highest per capita income in the nation (1960) to having nearly 80,000 abandoned homes (2013) simply because an industry “went south.” Many things could have been done to reinvent itself after the crash as many cities that lost manufacturing jobs did.
Seriously bad leadership, seriously bad decisions, and seriously bad voter choices were larger contributing factors. The ineptitude and mismanagement was really inexcusable, especially once the American car industry erosion was well on its way and everyone could see it.
The governance structure change in the early 70’s did not help and the mayor is a strong position in Detroit. It has been run by Democrat mayors continuously since 1962.
Say what you will but that is quite an accomplishment for a string of leaders with similar thought and outlook – to basically run a city from being one of the most desirable and wealthy places in America to the bottom of the barrel in 40 years.
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Let us remember that termites produce more CO2 thank mankind (which supports the hypothesis that CO2 increase follows warming) and that methane is a non-starter in the heat absorption race because its spectrum is entirely duplicated by H2O
Zeke said @ur momisugly June 6, 2014 at 5:50 pm
And it’s completely irrelevant to the issue of the introduction of organic farming practises. You appear to be as completely ignorant of what that means as the greens who give lip-service to the concept. You wrote above that only 1% of US farmland is farmed organically without providing a scintilla of evidence. It might well be true that only 1% of US farmland is officially certified as organic, but there are plenty of farmers who have adopted organic technologies without being in the least bit interested in the official organic bureaucracy.
Example: quite a long time ago my conventional orcharding neighbour asked me what I was using to control Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM). I told him I was using Dipel (Bacillus Thuringiensis var. Berliner), but that I suspected it might be more expensive than his usual chemical control (back then Carbaryl IIRC). A year later my neighbour reported that Dipel was dramatically less expensive even though the material cost was higher; it required application only once every six weeks, rather than weekly. The main cost of control was the time and equipment costs, not the control ingredient.
There’s quite a lot to this farming lark that people not directly involved do not appreciate. Most of the farmers I know will use any technique that improves the bottom line and don’t give a tinker’s curse for armchair theorists demands that they hew to some old-fashioned concepts from the middle of the last century.
Story here about a Tasmanian potato farmer adopting an organic technology:
http://www.theland.com.au/news/agriculture/horticulture/general-news/half-the-effort-double-the-spuds/2671885.aspx
“The Pompous Git says:
June 8, 2014 at 1:29 am
Most of the farmers I know will use any technique that improves the bottom line and don’t give a tinker’s curse for armchair theorists demands that they hew to some old-fashioned concepts from the middle of the last century.”
Indeed and well said that man!
Philippe (Alsace)
some though and interesting remarks have already been done so I will be short. Concerning Zeke’s comment on SA Wood i think he’s right in that wherever the words “climate change” are mentioned it smells bad…but as other readers seemed to suggest it is important to consider microbes in the cycle of carbon or nitrogen basically, no matter if organic farming or conventional one.
About termites, there is a such diversity between species, some of them being able to assimilate directly the wood without the help of fungi or bacteria, some other needing the help of endosymbiontic bacteria, that I Wonder why nobody did precise that and the possible interaction of that with abiotic factors. At least the authors should have indentified the fungi or termites community in each site of the study that can be accounted for the degradation of the wood.
Termites do not thrive at all in areas where the ground freezes. Yes there are northern termite colonies established in and under buildings and those colonies overwinter. But any colony that gets established in a forest or in woodlands gets wiped out when winter comes (normal winter). Most termite species and the most prevalent termite species are subterranean termites. If someone knows of a termite species that can overwinter in below freezing temperatures, please list its name and habitat. Termites are not like ants. They do not survive freezing temperatures.
William Abbott said @ur momisugly June 8, 2014 at 12:42 pm
Cryoprotection in dampwood termites (Termopsidae, Isoptera)
Michael J. Lacey*, Michael Lenz, Theodore A. Evans
Abstract
http://web.as.uky.edu/Biology/faculty/cooper/bio350/Bio350%20Labs/WK13-temp%20Lab/termites%20in%20cold.pdf
Ok, the exception proves the rule. A few Termites can take a little cold. This article substantiates that. But it’s Australia. Sub-zero is Celsius. Alpine is 1000 meters. BTW, subterranean termites in N America can take a little cold. But we’re not talking Kansas cold or Maine or Germany or Russia. Termites in those higher latitudes with harsh winters are not responsible for any meaningful percentage of wood decomposition. Thanks for posting the paper. Its interesting.