Construction of Searsville Dam in the 1890s created a biotically important lake in a watershed with a high sediment load. Siltation has now reduced the capacity of the lake by about 90 percent.
The photosynthetic machinery that enables plants to convert sunlight to chemical energy has two means of dissipating light energy that exceeds a leaf's needs: fluorescence, which is the instantaneous re-emission of light of another wavelength, and heat.
Many North American ants and lycaenid butterflies have a mutualistic relationship in which the ants protect butterfly larvae from parasitoid wasps, and the butterfly larvae secrete honeydew which the ants consume.
In California, Lyme disease is transmitted to humans by the bite of Western black-legged ticks (Ixodes pacificus) infected with the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi. Several factors make Lyme disease a challenge for visitors to natural areas where the tick and bacterium are found.
A major gap in our understanding of how Earth's biosphere will respond to rising concentrations of atmospheric CO2 is whether ecosystems will increase their net uptake of CO2 through photosynthesis and growth, and if so, by how much.