It is the end of an era… but both of the lab’s first two postdocs have now wrapped up their contracts and are on their way to their next jobs. I will miss the energy and community spirit they each brought to the lab, and look forward to return visits and future collaborations. In the meantime, congratulations to Luiza and Pierre both, and warm wishes for their next adventures!

Dr. Luiza Aparecido (lab postdoc 2018 – 2020; 2nd from left) was recently awarded and accepted the competitive Arizona State University School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) postdoctoral fellowship, which starts July 2020 and will extend for 3 years. She’ll be mentored by SESE faculty Drs. Heather Throop, Jnaneshwar Das and Greg Asner, and Desert Botanical Garden researcher Dr. Kevin Hultine. The proposal awarded aims to combine advanced remote sensing technology and machine learning with ground-based sensor technology (i.e., weather and physiological) to quantify the trade-offs between surface shading and water investment by landscape trees of Phoenix (AZ) in real time. This project has as a major goal to provide usual tools for tree selection based on their water use and canopy shape in towns that are or will be affected by heat island effects.

Dr. Pierre Gaüzère (lab postdoc 2018 – 2020; 2nd from right) recently started a postdoc position at the LECA (Laboratory of Alpine Ecology) in Grenoble (France) with Wilfried Thuiller and Tamara Münkemüller. The MacroEco group at the LECA investigates how biogeographic history and community assembly rules shape species’ ranges and biodiversity patterns, and how these processes interact to drive the response of populations and communities to environmental changes. The group mainly focus on vegetation but research theme covers all taxa, starting from the very local scale (1m plot) to the globe and encapsulating past, current and future times. Within the MacroEco group, Pierre will lead several projects aiming at (i) better understanding the disequilibrium between plant trait distribution and environment, (ii) unraveling the processes promoting the maintenance of functional rarity at community scale, (iii) and exploring their consequences on ecosystem functioning. He will rely on ecoinformatic approaches and leverage data from observational studies along gradients in the Alps mountains, and global scale biodiversity and environmental data.