Usually I like seeing marmots. They represent everything I like about the high country out here. But recently our relationship has gotten much worse. The problem happened at 8:28:57 AM on July 1st, when a marmot bit through the sensor cable of the solar radiation probe for my weather station. I had left the cables…

Living the middle of a national forest in the Rockies means that there is more wildlife in and around my house than you might expect. Here a few of the regular visitors. First, here is a deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus) that moved in when the snowpack was still melting. It found a supply of packing…

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…