(guest post by Dr. Lars Iversen) Current climate warming in Arctic regions is driving changes in the structure and composition of tundra ecosystems. This is causing shifts in local plant communities and changes the physiological stress that plants experience during a growth season. One response to increasing temperatures is system wide increases in the amount…

This week the lab celebrated two undergraduate students from Arizona State University finishing their undergraduate thesis work, both co-supervised by myself and Dr. Luiza Aparecido. A few screenshots from the Zoom defenses are below. Miguel Duarte wrote a thesis entitled, ‘Herbivory-driven impacts on desert plant photosynthesis depend on leaf traits’. Martha Ryan wrote an honors…

We have a new paper out in New Phytologist that develops methods for automatically segmenting and extracting networks from images of leaf veins. You can read the paper at the journal and download a copy of the software (LeafVeinCNN) at Zenodo. These networks are useful for a range of ecophysiology and evolution questions, but have been…

We held a great lab social last night over Zoom. We had two real pumpkins, and two creative alternates (a pomegranate and an apple respectively). Luiza’s pumpkin was the carving contest winner!