Off to the Amazon – two weeks ago Dr. Luiza Aparecido and I headed to eastern Ecuador to start a new ecophysiology project. We are working with Dr. Renato Valencia, his student Emily Guevara, botanist Pablo Alvia, and Dr. Rafael Cárdenas (all at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador) to better understand tradeoffs underlying herbivory…

(guest post via the American Geophysical Union blog) Greetings from Panama! Here is a snapshot of one day of nearly thirty of postdocs Dr. Hugo Candido and I (Dr. Luiza Aparecido) collecting gas exchange data from mature tropical trees at the STRI Sherman/San Lorenzo crane site in Panama. To compensate my fear of heights and…

Undergraduate researcher Sabrina Woo just accepted two prestigious awards here at ASU – a ‘true grit’ award, and a ‘student of the year’ award. They are both well-deserved. Sabrina joined us a year ago, and has done a great job working in both the desert and in the wet lab, while also taking good care…

This week Carolyn Flower defended her masters thesis, titled “Food Plant Biogeography of the Sonoran Desert”. She is the lab’s first ASU student to graduate. Carolyn’s work focused on human impacts on plant dispersal and biogeography, as seen through the lens of food uses. She has shown that in the Sonoran Desert, many edible species…