Lab postdoc Pierre and students Ivanna and Courtenay have just published a study on trait-based community assembly in Functional Ecology. Pierre wrote a blog post for the journal which I copy below. Are ecological communities saturated with species? This question is linked to whether ecosystems can reach equilibrium, and whether introduced species are likely to…

This summer we are hosting our first-ever remote research program for undergraduate students and K-12 teachers. We had been planning to bring several people to Ghana for tropical forest plant ecology fieldwork – and when that became impossible, to instead host them at our lab in Berkeley for the summer. Unfortunately the world has not…

Lab postdoc Luiza Aparecido just had a paper published in Ecology Letters showing that leaf water and carbon use in Sonoran Desert plants challenges current stomatal regulation theory – many species use far more water than expected in hot conditions, even when carbon gain is not occurring. This is her guest post. You can https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ele.13516…

Congratulations to Courtenay Ray, who just passed her qualifying exam yesterday. She is now the lab’s first PhD candidate, and hopefully the first and only lab member to endure a 100% remote examination process. The committee included Carl Boettiger, Albert Ruhi, Roberto Salguero-Gómez, and David Ackerly. (screenshot credit Rob)