Spring is here, bringing 90°F temperatures and sunny skies to Arizona. The spring has also brought in our last arrivals, and so the first cohort of the Macrosystems Ecology Lab is now assembled. The team is an even mixture of people from abroad and from closer by – from left to right, Pierre Gaüzère (France),…

We have a new paper on megafauna and human impacts on plants in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week. There are many New World plant species that produce large fruits – for example, avocados, cherimoya, or cacao, or some species of Pouteria and Inga. These species were originally dispersed (via consumption and…

We have a publication on venation network architecture now out in Journal of Ecology. The study is focused on the drivers of network reticulation (looping) Some leaves have venation networks that do not form loops (e.g. Gingko biloba, the maidenhair tree), while others do (e.g. Citrus sinensis, the sweet orange). Why does this variation exist?…

A few weeks ago I wrote about a co-authored study led by Ethan Butler in PNAS on mapping global plant trait distributions. This week we have a new paper coming out in Journal of Biogeography, led by Irena Šimova, that focuses on New World trait distributions using different data and approaches, and finds some complementary…