A guest post by lead author and lab postdoc Brad Posch – The summer of 2023 in Phoenix, AZ, was (at the time) the hottest ever recorded. But it’s not just in the southwest United States where record-breaking temperatures are becoming more common; heatwaves are increasingly longer, hotter, and occurring more often around the world.…

We just put out a new paper focusing on a classic and challenging set of questions in community ecology. The first question is about predicting: how a community’s composition changes over time (an outcome), with or without an intervention (an action); the second question is about prioritizing: how to identify the particular action that should…

The lab recently commissioned composer Marcus Norris of the South Side Symphony to write a concerto on the theme of human resilience, drawing inspiration from the lab’s work on resilience in leaf venation networks. Check out this recent performance of the piece at the Segerstrom Center in Costa Mesa, California, with Megan Shung on erhu.…

Lab postdoc Ilaine shares her new paper in New Phytologist! If you ever spend time looking at leaves of different species, you probably noticed that the way leaf veins are organized varies enormously (Fig.1). Some leaves only have a single vein, others exhibit complex venation networks with thousands of interconnected veins. Some networks are strictly…