(guest post by lead author Dr. Jolanta Rieksta, who did this project as her masters’ thesis) A fundamental question in trait-based ecology is whether variation within species across environmental gradients is primarily driven by genetic differences, resulting in local adaptation with little or no variation among genotypes, or by phenotypic plasticity, where individuals can adjust…

(guest post on a new Nature Plants paper by lead author/past postdoc Dr. Ilaine Matos) Over the past 400 million years, the leaves of vascular plants have diversified to generate an astonishing variety of forms and venation architectures (Fig.1). But exactly when, why, and in which plant clades the new vein architectural combinations arose and…

The lab has a new protocol manuscript out in Applications in Plant Sciences. For the last several years we have been doing extensive leaf clearing and imaging work for studies on venation. While the basics of the protocol are well known and used by many people, there has been limited information available on the practical…

Check out our new publication on tropical forest land use change, focusing on oil palm and selective logging in Malaysian Borneo! It just came out in Science and is covered in The Conversation. I made a small contribution to the microclimate and functional trait datasets, but the overall project represents a huge effort from numerous people…