Category: Uncategorized
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The perils and promise of selecting a research site
I’ve been trying to choose a research site in the Rockies for several months. It’s not easy. I want to study how alpine plant communities respond to disturbance, and I want to study it in the long term. This means I need to choose a research site that I won’t regret a decade from now.…
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Reconsidering rhododendron
Jens-Christian Svenning (at Aarhus University in Denmark) had some important comments on my last blog post that are worth sharing: Interestingly, Rhodendron ponticum is not truly biogeographically non-native to NW Europe. It now has a relict distribution in the W Palearctic and was formerly much more widespread. Most notably, it reached the British Isles on…
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Battling a monoculture
A beautiful view from the coastal cliffs in Exmoor – but not if you look more closely. The right side of the photograph is dominated by a dense yellow-green canopy extending up and down the cliffs for kilometers in each direction. It looks like a scar, or a cancer. What is it? If you walk…
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Every mountain and hill shall be brought low
Can you guess what this is a photograph of? It’s an algal bloom on the surface of a lake, seen from above. The algae are growing so well because of eutrophication due to shallow depths, low flow, and high nutrient inputs. The pattern is beautiful, but the lake itself is a mess. When I say…