Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Goats do roam

Not to goad you into visiting my blog more often...(cue the snare drum)...but this is another story about goats, and there's more to come!

With co-authors Brian Silliman, Tom Mozdzer, Christine Angelini, Jennifer Brundage, Peter Esselink, Jan Bakker, Johan van de Koppel, and Andy Baldwin, I've published a paper in PeerJ about goat control of the invasive common reed Phragmites australis. Goats were enclosed in Phragmites stands for about 9 weeks over the course of two summers to control Phragmites growth and allow for native plant regrowth.

It worked! Phragmites stem density and stem height were reduced by 50-60% and plant diversity increased 4-fold in enclosures relative to ungrazed controls. We also found that cows and horses readily eat Phragmites, and that it provides a nutritional fodder for them, especially in the early summer. We recommend livestock grazing as a tool for managing invasive Phragmites when grazers can be enclosed and rotated across the landscape in short durations.

Please read the paper and leave comments on the PeerJ webpage

More info on the effect of goat control of invasive species in secondary forest understory coming soon....


Thursday, September 4, 2014

Put a little mussel in it

A press release and blog post about my recent Restoration Ecology article with co-authors Lisa Kellogg and Denise Breitburg about incorporating water filtration by bent mussels into water quality models of oyster reef restoration: 

Study puts some mussels into Bay restoration http://www.vims.edu/newsandevents/topstories/mussels.php

Oysters have sidekick in Chesapeake Bay clean-up http://sercblog.si.edu/?p=5331