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)

Congratulations to Ivanna Caspeta, whose poster presentation on vacant niches at a recent WAESO conference won a first place award! Ivanna also more recently presented her work at ASU’s SOLUR symposium, which was held virtually via Zoom – where she also gave a great presentation. Thanks to lab postdoc Pierre for leading mentoring for this…