Go exploring in the higher latitudes of North America and you may find yourself in a forest that look like this one below. Small hardwood trees and an understorey dominated by royal ferns (Osmunda regalis). This ancient-looking scene hides a more interesting story. Here the ground is swampy and often spotted with small pools of…

Networks are now used to describe all sorts of systems – social worlds, protein interactions, food webs, and so on. For example, here you see a litter of marmot pups, where a network could be used to describe relationships between each individual animal. These networks are useful because they allow us to identify interesting structures…

After a beautiful seven weeks, the time has come to leave the mountains and depart for more civilized and less magical parts of the world. So a short valedictory to my summer home, the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. Here is the lab’s home: the townsite of Gothic, once home to a small mining town. We…

My corner of Colorado is home to high peaks and deep glacial lakes – this montane and alpine zone hosts characteristic species like pines, firs, and a host of perennial herbs and shrubs like Erigeron spp.,  Potentilla sp. and Veratrum tenuipetalum. Here you can see several of these species near a wilderness lake at the…