I just had a new paper come out (read in in the American Journal of Botany or download a PDF) exploring the question of why triploid aspen are common in western North America. This pattern is initially difficult to explain because triploids typically have low fertility due to chromosome segregation problems. The study does a…

Like a straw can collapse under the suction of a thirsty drinker, the xylem conduits in leaves can collapse as water potential declines during droughts (Figure 1). In collapsed conduits the water flow is limited or even completely interrupted, so plants must reinforce their conduits to resist crushing pressures. The thicker the conduit double cell…

Lab undergraduate student Dan Chen (now graduated!) just published a new methods paper on doing statistical inference on hypervolumes. It provides some important extensions to the hypervolume R package to do hypothesis tests, calculate p-values, etc. He and Alex Laini did the key development work. You can read it at the journal Methods in Ecology…

History Colorado’s Lost Highways podcast recently featured my article, A Lynching in Gothic, Colorado?. You can listen to the episode, put together by Blake Pfeil, at: https://pod.link/1477656916/episode/78f0ec1c4599c869782eabecd9c2cfc0 How did the mountains get so white? Not snow, but people. It wasn’t always so. And on this episode we look at a particular history of violence toward…