Bethany Bradley wins Prestigious Mercer Award

Bethany Bradley wins Prestigious Mercer Award

George Mercer Award: Bethany A. Bradley, Brit B. Laginhas, Raj Whitlock, Jenica M. Allen, Amanda E. Bates, Genevieve Bernatchez, Jeff Diez, Regan Early, Jonathan Lenoir, Montserrat Vilà, Cascade J. B. Sorte The Mercer Award recognizes an outstanding, recently published, ecological research paper by young scientists. This year’s Mercer Award goes to the authors of “Disentangling the abundance–impact relationship for invasive species.” This paper is the first meta-analysis to win the Mercer Award. Meta-analyses have become an important ecological research tool since their introduction into ecology in the early 1990s, and the work by Bethany A. Bradley and colleagues identified a novel general pattern that likely could not have been discovered or confirmed except via meta-analysis. Their comprehensive global meta-analysis of 1258 studies addresses how the impacts of invasive species scale with their abundances. The analysis revealed striking general pattern across trophic levels: invasive species’ impacts on lower trophic levels increase steeply but nonlinearly with their abundances, so that per-capita impact declines with increasing...
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Bethany Bradley on Fighting Scourge of Cheatgrass

Bethany Bradley on Fighting Scourge of Cheatgrass

Click here for New York Times full story Researcher Finds Way to Fight Cheatgrass, a Western Scourge By CHRISTOPHER SOLOMON OCT. 5, 2015   Cheatgrass could vie for the title of the most successful invasive species in North America. The weed lives in every state, and is the dominant plant on more than 154,000 square miles of the West, by one estimate. When it turns green in the spring, “you can actually see it from space,” said Bethany Bradley, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who studies biogeography, the spatial distribution of species. The sins of cheatgrass are many. Its tenacious seeds lodge in the eyes and gums of livestock (not to mention the ears of pets and the socks of hikers). Even a moderate infestation in a wheat field can reduce yields by up to half. Areas in the Santa Fe National Forest in New Mexico had major fires in 1996 and 2011. As Fires Grow, a New Landscape Appears in the...
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Scott Jackson, Bethany Bradley, Thomas Cairns Release Pipeline Study

Scott Jackson, Bethany Bradley, Thomas Cairns Release Pipeline Study

Courtesy: UMass Center of Agriculture, Food and the Environment Center of Agriculture, Food, and the Environment has released “A Natural Resources Assessment of the Tennessee Gas Pipeline Company’s Proposed Northeast Energy Direct Project’s Pipeline Route Within Massachusetts.” The assessment was conducted by a team from the Department of Environmental Conservation, including Scott Jackson, extension associate professor, Bethany Bradley, assistant professor, and Thomas Cairns, MS candidate. The authors created the assessment by utilizing a compilation of twenty available inventories of natural resources and environmental resources in Massachusetts, from state and UMass Amherst sources. These inventories were mapped against the mainline route of the proposed pipeline and then the proportion of affected resources was compared to the availability of the particular resource countywide and statewide. This method resulted in identification of key resources most likely to be impacted by the pipeline. Volume One covers the mainline of the pipeline and is now available for download here. Volume Two (forthcoming) will cover the spurs. ...
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