Zhou Yufei

Assessing the Effects of Management Alternatives on Habitat Suitability in a Forested Landscape of Northeastern China

Forest management often has cumulative, long-lasting effects on wildlife habitat suitability and the effects may be impractical to evaluate using landscape-scale field experiments. To understand such effects, we linked a spatially explicit landscape disturbance and succession model (LANDIS) with habitat suitability index (HSI) models to assess the effects of management alternatives on habitat suitability in a forested landscape of northeastern China. LANDIS was applied to simulate future forest landscape changes under four management alternatives (no cutting, clearcutting, selective cutting I and II) over a 200-year horizon. The simulation outputs were linked with HSI models for three wildlife species, the red squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris), the red deer (Cervus elaphus) and the hazel grouse (Bonasa bonasia). These species are chosen because they represent numerous species that have distinct habitat requirements in our study area. We assessed their habitat suitability based on the mean HSI values, which is a measure of the average habitat quality. Our simulation results showed that no one management scenario was the best for all species and various forest management scenarios would lead to conflicting wildlife habitat outcomes. How to choose a scenario is dependent on the trade-off of economical, ecological and social goals. Our modeling effort could provide decision makers with relative comparisons among management scenarios from the perspective of biodiversity conservation. The general simulation results were expected based on our knowledge of forest management and habitat relationships of the species, which confirmed that the coupled modeling approach correctly simulated the assumed relationships between the wildlife, forest composition, age structure, and spatial configuration of habitat. However, several emergent results revealed the unexpected outcomes that a management scenario may lead to.

Inhibition of SbABI5 Expression in Roots by Ultra-high Endogenous ABA Accumulation Results in Sorghum Sensitivity to Salt Stress

In this study, we firstly investigated the germination rate, growth and dry weight of shoots and roots in two sorghum cultivars, Liaoza15 and Longza11, to analysis the physiological responses of sorghum to salt and ABA. We found that Liaoza15 had high salt and ABA tolerance, but Longza11 was hypersensitive to salt and ABA stress during germination and early seedling growth. Secondly, we found that salt-induced ABA accumulation was higher and more sustained in Longza11 than in Liaoza15. Nextly, we analyzed the salt-induced expression of SbABIs in the two sorghum cultivars and AtABIs in wild type Arabidopsis. The result showed that the change in SbABI5 expression in the roots was the most obvious difference between the two cultivars, namely salt did not induce SbABI5 in the roots of Longza11 but increased it by about 3-fold in the roots of Liaoza15. And the salt treatments also increased the expression of AtABI5 in the roots, suggesting changes of SbABI5 expression in the roots is a key step in the ABA signaling pathway to improve salt tolerance in sorghum. Finally, we found that the expression of SbABI5 was strongly induced by relatively low concentrations of ABA rather than by extremely high concentrations of ABA.