Category: Uncategorized
-
New publication – trait-climate relationships of New World woody and herbaceous plants
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…
-
Sky School in the city
At Sky School we are committed to inquiry-based and place-based science education. Most of our K-12 programs occur at our campus on Mt. Lemmon, but not all K-12 schools have the resources or time available to bring their students to us. Thanks to the hard work of our education director Rebecca Lipson, we have been…
-
New publication on mapping plant traits at global scale
What is the functional composition of a landscape in Borneo, or of one in central England? Knowing the answer is critical for mapping ecosystem functioning (for example, carbon fluxes), for conservation work (for example, understanding where landscapes have more functions and may be more resilient), Traditionally, answering this question could be done based on one…
-
New publication: predicting venation traits on a tropical forest elevation gradient
We just had a new study come out on predicting leaf traits from reflectance spectroscopy. The study was led by Chris Doughty and Paul Efren Santos Andrade as part of the broader CHAMBASA elevation gradient project in Peru. In many ecological applications, measuring leaf traits is very useful (e.g. photosynthetic rates, which help predict plant…