The perils and promise of selecting a research site

I’ve been trying to choose a research site in the Rockies for several months. It’s not easy. I want to study how alpine plant communities respond to disturbance, and I want to study it in the long term. This means I need to choose a research site that I won’t regret a decade from now….

Reconsidering rhododendron

Jens-Christian Svenning (at Aarhus University in Denmark) had some important comments on my last blog post that are worth sharing: Interestingly, Rhodendron ponticum is not truly biogeographically non-native to NW Europe. It now has a relict distribution in the W Palearctic and was formerly much more widespread. Most notably, it reached the British Isles on…