Most academic publications go ignored and poorly cited; fewer make an impact or controversy. I recently had the dubious honor of two papers being ‘debunked’ in the scientific literature. My papers were focused on explaining the leaf economics spectrum – a global pattern that describes leaves use resources like carbon and nitrogen (Wright et al.,…

If you travel from the alpine zone to the lowland tropics, more than just the climate will change. Species composition follows changing environments: there is a reason why a Cyathea tree fern doesn’t live in Colorado but does live in Costa Rica. (Note of course that many millions of years ago, when the earth was…

The sound of a rattlesnake is unmistakable once you’ve heard it once. But this sound wasn’t on my mind when I almost stepped on one a few weekends ago. I was in the Santa Rita mountains of southern Arizona. The highest peak, Mt. Wrightson, looms 7000 feet above the Tucson basin. In late March, mountaintops…

(Re-blogged from a piece I wrote for the White House) My great-grandfather immigrated to the United States from China in 1915, at the age of 11. He soon became the owner of a corner grocery store in Tucson, Arizona, and stayed in the community for decades. Now, almost a century later, I find myself living…