Desk biology

You might imagine that the life of an ecologist is spent mostly in beautiful and remote places. While this is sometimes true, a large fraction must also be spent in front of a computer. The reason is that science is only partially about making measurements or doing experiments. These parts are the glamorous ones, insofar…

Adapting to the winter

Cold depends so much on context. In the last two weeks, I’ve experienced two different winters separated by thirty degrees of latitude – Rondane National Park, in central Norway (62 °N), and now Tucson, in Arizona in the lower United States (32 °N). The experience has made me think more about how organisms (people included)…