The lab has been delving into remote sensing as a way to deepen understandings of plant community dynamics. Things look different from the air than they do from the ground, and drones can cover far more ground in a day than an ecologist with a ruler. This is the second year we are now monitoring…

Luiza’s new paper, High water use in desert plants exposed to extreme heat, is featured on the cover of Ecology Letters for August 2020. The cover shows a cottonwood, one of the species whose water use behavior was measured in the study. Please give it a read!

Most of our lab remains shut down due to health reasons and university policy, but a small part of our team is out in the mountains collecting data. We are under an exemption for critical time-sensitive work, which applies to some of our long-term demography datasets in the Rocky Mountains. We have one team out…

Lab postdoc Pierre and students Ivanna and Courtenay have just published a study on trait-based community assembly in Functional Ecology. Pierre wrote a blog post for the journal which I copy below. Are ecological communities saturated with species? This question is linked to whether ecosystems can reach equilibrium, and whether introduced species are likely to…