Ask a molecular biologist about their favorite plant and they will likely answer with Arabidopsis thaliana. This mustard-family species is an excellent resource for evolutionary biology because of the wide range of genetic and genomic resources available for it. As a result it has become a model organism for plants in the same way that…

How extreme can environments be before life can no longer hold on? The quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) trees I study seem to cope well with all sorts of extremes – they are found as far north as boreal Canada and as far south as Mexico. Normally when I see an average aspen clone, it looks…

For the past few days I have been testing an infrared camera for a study on temperature variation across environments. My assistant and I have been carrying approximately fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of non-waterproof equipment into the mountains to make some preliminary analyses. This gets interesting when the sun disappears, then wind picks up, the…

When is the snow going to melt? The alpine plants I study will not begin seriously growing until the ground is bare and the soil is unfrozen. I want to examine how the microclimate around these plants changes through this transition and into the growing season, but it’s hard to know what’s going on from…