Canyon lands guard well their secrets. Canyons themselves are not difficult to find – they form where water would run – but entrances and exits are more difficult to come by. And once inside a canyon, the world changes. This canyon is hard to notice at first, cut into the base of some otherwise unremarkable…

How does it feel to be done with school, forever? My PhD dissertation is defended, submitted, and approved, and a diploma will arrive in the mail in a few weeks. It has been a long road to get here, and it feels worthwhile to reflect on the experience. Graduate school was a five-year experience for…

Even a little water is worth fighting over. The summer is coming early this year, and what little surface water remains in many of the canyons is beginning to dry up. While walking in Finger Rock Canyon the other weekend, deep within a mesquite bosque, I found just a single small seep coming from a…

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.,…