Living the middle of a national forest in the Rockies means that there is more wildlife in and around my house than you might expect. Here a few of the regular visitors. First, here is a deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus) that moved in when the snowpack was still melting. It found a supply of packing…

Ask a molecular biologist about their favorite plant and they will likely answer with Arabidopsis thaliana. This mustard-family species is an excellent resource for evolutionary biology because of the wide range of genetic and genomic resources available for it. As a result it has become a model organism for plants in the same way that…

How extreme can environments be before life can no longer hold on? The quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) trees I study seem to cope well with all sorts of extremes – they are found as far north as boreal Canada and as far south as Mexico. Normally when I see an average aspen clone, it looks…

For the past few days I have been testing an infrared camera for a study on temperature variation across environments. My assistant and I have been carrying approximately fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of non-waterproof equipment into the mountains to make some preliminary analyses. This gets interesting when the sun disappears, then wind picks up, the…