Category: Uncategorized
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Installing a research site
Every day of the last week I have climbed the same mountain, bringing up cargoes of steel nails, aluminum tags, meter tapes, string, sandwiches, water, and everything else needed to install a long-term plant census site. The hike in is three miles and climbs from 9000′ to 11700′, rising from subalpine meadows through spruce forest…
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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…