2012 CREST Annual Report - Alabama A&M University

4. Invasive Potential of Five Alien Trees in the Forest of the Southern Region, United StatesD. Lemke, P. Hulme, J. Brown, J. Miller, J. CoulstonIn the southern region of the United States invasive plants are one of the threats to the long termsustainability of our forest ecosystems, along with climate and land use change. We assessed thepotential distribution of five alien trees in the southern region on forested lands. Maximum entropyalgorithms were used to integrate anthropogenic and environmental variables with speciesoccurrence data from the USDA Forest Service. All five species were predicted to significantlyincrease their distribution at the regional level under current conditions. Four climate changescenarios were then applied to the current potential with the five species responded exceedinglydifferent to the future scenario, particularly when climate variables had higher variability betweencurrent conditions and future scenarios.5. Value of Systematic Versus Opportunistic Data for Species Distribution Modeling: casestudy of five invasive trees in the southern United StatesD. Lemke, P. Hulme, J. Brown, J. Miller, J. CoulstonInvasive species are one of the fundamental ecological challenges we are currently facing.Knowledge is the best tool in this battle, in not only determining which species will become the mostdetrimental but where they will have the greatest negative impact. One tool that is available toassist in this fight is species distribution models (SDMs). SDMs make predictions about unsampledlocations using the relationships between species and environmental parameters. They are designedto make use of known information of species that are at equilibrium with the environment, andwork best when a full range of the environment has been sampled. However, they have also shownpromise for the study of invasive species, species that have yet to reach equilibrium, or not fullysampled. In this chapter we assess the applicability of different types of datasets to modeling fiveinvasive trees with forests of the southern United States. We used intensively collected systematicabsence/presence data (Forest Inventory and Analysis, FIA), occurrence only, opportunistic data(Global Biodiversity Information Facility, GBIF), and combined datasets.INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH AND EXCHANGENatural resources in GuyanaR. Fraser, D. Singh, H. Alam, L. Carrington, P. ChesneyThis involved four activities: A facilitated discussion of field-training needs in the natural resourcessector in Guyana, Draft and submit 8 proposals to study Mangrove restoration efforts in Guyana, Leadstakeholder discussion and develop the terms of reference for an International Biodiversity Centre, and6 nation dialogue on natural resource conservation and management of the Guyana.