Andrei G. Lapenis

Directed Evolution of the Biosphere: Biogeochemical Selection or Gaia?

At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, a few Russian scientists proposed an interrelated hypothesis on the coevolution of life and the environment. Because political, linguistic, and cultural barriers between Russia and the rest of the world existed through most of the twentieth century, many of their concepts are not well known in Western science. The synthesis of their works presented in this article leads to the concept of directed evolution of the global ecosystem. Similar to the influential Gaia hypothesis, this concept predicts evolution of the global ecosystem toward conditions generally favorable for organisms. Unlike the Gaia hypothesis, however, the directed evolution in works of Russian scientists results from the superposition of “micro–forces” controlled on local and regional scales by the universal criterion of biogeochemical selection.

A Newly Identified Role of the Deciduous Forest Floor in the Timing of Green‐Up

Plant phenology studies rarely consider controlling factors other than air temperature. We evaluate here the potential significance of physical and chemical properties of soil (edaphic factors) as additional important controls on phenology. More specifically, we investigate causal connections between satellite-observed green-up dates of small forest watersheds and soil properties in the Adirondack Mountains of New York, USA. Contrary to the findings of previous studies, where edaphic controls of spring phenology were found to be marginal, our analyses show that at least three factors manifest themselves as significant controls of seasonal patterns of variation in vegetated land surfaces observed from remote sensing: 1) thickness of the forest floor, 2) concentration of exchangeable soil potassium, and 3) soil acidity. For example, a thick forest floor appears to delay the onset of green-up. Watersheds with elevated concentrations of potassium are associated with early surface greening. We also found that trees growing in strongly acidified watersheds demonstrate delayed green-up dates. Overall, our work demonstrates that, at the scale of small forest watersheds, edaphic factors can explain a significant percentage of the observed spatial variation in Land Surface Phenology that is comparable to the percentage that can be explained by climatic and landscape factors. We conclude that physical and chemical properties of forest soil play important roles in forest ecosystems as modulators of climatic drivers controlling the rate of spring soil warming and the transition of trees out of winter dormancy.

Dendrochemical evidence for soil recovery from acidic deposition in forests of the northeastern U.S. with comparisons to the southeastern U.S. and Russia

A soil resampling approach has detected an early stage of recovery in the cation chemistry of spruce forest soil due to reductions in acid deposition. That approach is limited by the lack of soil data and archived soil samples prior to major increases in acid deposition during the latter half of the 20th century. An alternative approach is the dendrochemical analysis of dated wood to detect temporal changes in base cations back into the 19th century. To infer environmental change from dendrochemical patterns of essential base cations, internal factors that affect cation chemistry such as the maturation of sapwood and the spread of wood infection need to be recognized. Potassium concentration was a useful marker of these internal maturation and infection that could affect the concentration of essential base cations in wood. Dendrochemical patterns in samples of red spruce in the eastern United States and Norway spruce in northwestern Russia were used to determine how internal changes in base cations can be separated from external changes in root-zone soil to date major changes in the availability of essential base cations associated with a changing environment.