Dan Binkley -- Current and Recent Projects

dan@cnr.colostate.edu

Colorado State University

Department of Forest, Rangeland, and Watershed Stewardship,

Colorado Forest Restoration Institute, and

Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory

Full CV

List of Publications (including some downloadable Adobe.pdf)

Prospectus on Graduate Studies

Thoughts on Science, Ecology, and Forestry

Modestly cool photos

Over the past 25 years, my students, colleagues and I have worked on a wide range of projects, from natural forest and soil dynamics in northern Alaska to ecosystem production in intensively managed Eucalyptus forests in Hawaii and Brazil. These original research projects have been joined by many papers and books emphasizing synthesis of knowledge. The largest share of my current work deals with the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute, chartered by Congress to improve the health of forests and reduce the risk of severe wildfires. Our intensive productivity studies continue in Brazil, along with various projects run by graduate students.

Syntheses:

Individual studies in ecology need to be woven together into tapestries to tell larger stories. Some of the larger stories my colleagues, students and I have woven in the past 5 yr (see publications page for older work): Nfix

Binkley, D., T. Sisk, C. Chambers, J. Springer, and W. Block. 2007. The role of old-growth forests in frequent-fire landscapes. Ecology and Society 12(2): 18. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol12/iss2/art18/

Kaufmann, M.D. Binkley, P. Fule, M. Johnson, S.L. Stephens, and T.W. Swetnam. 2007. Defining old growth for fire-adapted forests of the western United States. Ecology and Society 12(2): 15. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol12/iss2/art15/

Binkley, D. 2006. Soils in ecology and ecology in soils. Chapter 10 in: History of Soil Science (B. Warkentin, ed.).

Binkley, D., and O. Menyailo (eds). 2005. Tree Species Effects on Soils: Implications for Global Change. NATO Science Series, Springer, Dordrecht.

Binkley, D., and J.L. Stape. 2004. Sustainable management of Eucalyptus plantations in a changing world. Pp. 11-17 in: Eucalyptus in a Changing World, N. Borralho et al. (editors), Proceedings of IUFRO Conference, Aveiro 11-15, 2004.

Binkley, D., G.G. Ice, J. Kaye, and C.A. Williams. 2004. Patterns of Variation in Nitrogen and Phosphorus Concentrations in Forest Streams of the United States. Journal of the American Water Association, in press.

Binkley, D., 2004. A hypothesis about the interaction of tree dominance and stand production through stand development. Forest Ecology and Management 190:265-271.

Binkley, D., J.L. Stape, and M.G. Ryan. 2004. Thinking about efficiency of resource use in forests. Forest Ecology and Management 193:5-17

Yanai, R.D., S.V. Stehman, M.A. Arthur, C.E. Prescott, A.J. Friedland, T.G. Siccama, and D. Binkley. 2004. Detecting change in forest floor carbon. Soil Science Society of America Journl 67:1583-1593.

Binkley, D. 2003. Response to: Lessons from the Sandbox: is unexplained nitrogen real? Ecosystems 5:734-735.

Augusto, L., J. Ranger, D. Binkley, and A. Rothe. 2002. Impact of some common tree species of European temperate forests on soil fertility. Annals of Forest Science, 59:233-253.

Rocky Mountains:

--effects of elk on N cycling. Rocky Mountain National Park has extremely high densities of elk in low-elevation valleys, and the elk have altered the vegetation. In the photo, not only are the aspen restricted to inside the exclosure, but even the sagebrush is growing better inside. What are the effects on N cycling? We examined various components of the N budget in 30 exclosures and adjacent areas. Bottom line: nitrogen limits vegetation growth whether or not elk browsing is present, but the elk have not yet had a major effect on N cycling (supported by USGS).

What’s the aspen regeneration story around the Rocky Mountain National Park? (funded by USGS) We've done several systematic surveys of aspen across the Park, in pure stands and in stands mixed with conifers. Aspen regeneration has been generally good over the past 120 years, except in areas with excessively high elk population in the past 30 years. In those portions of the Park, aspen recruitment is about 85-95% lower than expected from long term trends. (projects with Tom Stohlgren, USGS/BRD, graduate students Kuni Suzuki and Margot Kaye).

Was Aldo Leopold right about the Kaibab deer herd? A central paradigm in wildlife ecology is that predation is a good thing for prey species: predation limits the population of the prey, and keeps the prey from overpopulating and devastating the habitat. This appealing idea was advocated by Aldo Leopold, and he used the classic story of the Kaibab deer herd as an illustration. The wolves, lions, and coyotes on the Kaibab Plateau were decimated by government hunters after the plateau was established as a game preserve -- and Leopold tells the story that the deer population exploded, the range was degraded, and the deer population crashed below the level that could have been sustained with a healthy amount of sustained predation. We challenged this idea by determining the cohort structure of aspen across the Plateau. High populations of starving deer should have prevented the establishment of aspen during the 1920s; if we found a sizable cohort from that period, Leopold’s story would have to be wrong. Our descriptive and experimental investigations supported the idea of a major deer explosion in the 1920s – but also a much fuller story of long-term changes on the Plateau:

Kaibab

Spatial patterns in tree growth, resource supply, and efficiency of resource use. PhD student Suzanne Bird mapped the details of tree growth and resource use in a 10-ha stand of ponderosa pine in the Manitou Experimental Forest near Colorado Springs. All the trees in this plot have been mapped and measured repeatedly by US Forest Service personnel (supervised by Wayne Shepperd). Suzie used field measurements of soil, litterfall, and light interception to describe the spatial patterns in growth and resource use -- testing hypotheses about changes in efficiency of resource use as the supply of resources change. We also examined patterns in dominance among trees within stands for 140 forests across the Rocky Mountains, finding remarkable differences between single-species and mixed-species stands, as well as a remarkable lack of substantial dominance in lodgepole pine forests.

Binkley, D. 2007. Age distribution of aspen in Rocky Mountain National Park, USA. Forest Ecology and Management, in press.

Binkley, D., D.M. Kashian, S. Boyden, M.W. Kaye, J.B. Bradford, M.A. Arthur, P.J. Fornwalt, and M.G. Ryan. 2006. Patterns of Growth Dominance in Forests of the Rocky Mountains, USA. Forest Ecology and Management 236:193-201.

Binkley, D., M. Moore, W. Romme, and P. Brown. 2006. Was Aldo Leopold right about the Kaibab deer herd? Ecosystems 9: 227–241.

Boyden, S., D. Binkley, and W. Shepperd. 2005. Spatial and temporal patterns in structure, regeneration, and mortality of an old-growth ponderosa pine forest in the Colorado Front Range. Forest Ecology and Management 219:43-55.

Binkley, D., C.S. White, and J.R. Gosz. 2004. Tree biomass and net increment in an old aspen forest in New Mexico. Forest Ecology and Management, in press.

Kaye, M.W., D. Binkley, and T.J. Stohlgren. 2005. Long-term impacts of conifer invasion and elk browsing on quaking aspen forests in the central Rocky Mountains, USA. Ecological Applications 15:1284-1295.

Schoenecker, K.A., F.J. Singer, R.S.C. Menezes, L.C. Zeigenfuss, and D. Binkley. 2004. Sustainability of vegetation communities grazed by elk in Rocky Mountain National Park. Journal of Wildlife Management 68:835-847.

Binkley, D., F. Singer, M. Kaye, and R. Rochelle. 2003. Influence of elk grazing on soil properties in Rocky Mountain National Park. Forest Ecology and Management 185:239-245.

Kaye, M.W., T.J. Stohlgren, and D. Binkley. 2003. Aspen structure and variability in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, USA. Landscape Ecology 18:591-603.

Binkley, D., U. Olsson, R. Rochelle, T. Stohlgren, and N. Nikolov. 2002. Structure, production and resource use in old-growth spruce/fir forests in the central Rocky Mountains, USA. Forest Ecology and Management 172:271-279.

Olsson, U., D. Binkley, and F.W. Smith. 1998. Nitrogen supply, nitrogen use, and production in an age sequence of lodgepole pine. Forest Science 44:454-457.

Binkley, D., F.J. Singer, M. Kaye, and R. Rochelle. 2002. Influence of elk grazing in soil and nutrients in Rocky Mountain National Park. Pp. 75-186 in: Singer, F.J., and L.C. Zeigenfuss (eds.) Ecological Evaluation of the Abundance and Effects of Elk Herbivory in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, 1994-1999. US Geological Survey Open Report #02-208, Ft. Collins.

Schoenecker, K.A., F.J. Singer, R.S.C. Menezes, L.C. Zeigenfuss, and D. Binkley. 2002. Sustainability of vegetation communities grazed by elk in Rocky Mountain National Park. Pp. 187-204 in: Singer, F.J., and L.C. Zeigenfuss (eds.) Ecological Evaluation of the Abundance and Effects of Elk Herbivory in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, 1994-1999. US Geological Survey Open Report #02-208, Ft. Collins.

Kaye, M.W., K. Suzuki, D. Binkley, and T. Stohlgren. 2001. Landscape-scale dynamics of aspen in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado. In: Sustaining Aspen in Western Landscapes (W.D. Shepperd, D. Binkley, D. Bartos, T.J. Stohlgren, and L.G. Eskew, eds.), USDA Forest Service General Technical Report RMRS-P-18, Ft. Collins.

Shepperd, W.D., D. Binkley, D. Bartos, T.J. Stohlgren, and L.G. Eskew (eds). 2001. Sustaining Aspen in Western Landscapes (.), USDA Forest Service General Technical Report RMRS-P-18. 460 pp.

Suzuki, K., H. Suzuki, D. Binkley, and T. Stohlgren. 1999. Aspen regeneration in the Colorado Front Range: differences at local and landscape scales. Landscape Ecology 14:231-237.

Productivity in fast-growing plantations

-- What controls the peak of stand production with age, and why does it decline while the trees are still young and vigorous? (Sponsored by NSF, and 8 companies in Brazil) The old answer of increasing respiration cost of maintaining big trees has been largely discounted by data and modeling. In Hawaii we established stands of 2 densities (to vary the ratio between leaf area and wood biomass/tree) and three fertilization regimes, and have been following the entire carbon C budget in 18 plots. We essentially disproved all our original ideas, finding that gross primary production declined in older periods despite sustained high use of water, light and nutrients. This led to a series of more ambitious projects in Brazil that included testing aspects of genetics, stand structure, and resource supply.

We've also done extensive work comparing replicated plantations of Eucalyptus and N-fixing Albizia. The greater wood production by the Eucalyptus trees results in part from greater total productivity (NPP), and in part from greater allocation of production aboveground.

This project involves intensive soil experiments, including changes in soil C. The prior land use was sugar cane cropping, and the C4 signature on the "old" soil C allows us to examine both the loss of "old" soil C and gain of new C3 carbon from the Eucalyptus. After 8 years, the total soil C had not changed, but there was a significant loss of old C, and a significant gain of new C. Intriguingly, addition of massive amounts of fertilizer N did not alter the gain of new C or loss of old C -- exactly unlike our findings for N fixation!

We started a new project in Hawaii in 1999 (NSF support): We harvested 18-yr-old plantations of Eucalyptus and Albizia, and used reciprocal plantings to examine the second-rotation legacy of the first-rotation species, including fertilization treatments to try and modify the legacy. The project is a collaboration between the University of Hawaii in Hilo (a traditional undergraduate institution with a large minority enrollment), CSU, and the USDA Forest Service. Randy Senock at UHH is the leader, with collaborators including: Bob Powers and Matt Busse of the Forest Service, and Thais Winsome from UC Davis. This second rotation will be complete in the summer of 2008, when we’ll assess the overall outcome of the experiment. .

Brazil: Prof. Jose Luis Stape at the University of Sao Paulo in Piracicaba, Brazil is leading several sets of great studies on factors controlling growth of Eucalyptus plantations. Mike Ryan (USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station) and I are collaborating with Stape. Clonal plantations are much more uniform in structure (left side of photo) than seedling-origin stands (right side of photo), and we're using this uniformity to examine a single-tree/stand-structure hypothesis for age-related declines in stand growth.

We started a series of plantation projects in Brazil in 2001, and followed the complete carbon budget for an entire rotation, examining the importance of genetics (clones vs. seedlings), stand structure (uniform clonal-origin trees vs. same genotype but with more diversity of tree sizes within plots), water supply and nutrient supply. Eight companies (VCP, Aracruz, International Paper, Veracel, Copener, CENIBRA, Suzano-Bahia Sul, and Vallourec Mannesmann) are participating in the Brazil Eucalyputs Potential Productivity (BEPP) Project. We’ll be hosting an international conference on productivity in tropical tree plantations in Porto Seguro, Brazil, in October 2008. (http://lamar.colostate.edu/~binkley/Brazileucalyptus.htm; Stape pictured at left in 2 yr old stand .