Measuring plants is surprisingly controversial, and often very difficult. Consider, for example, deciding how to measure the size of a leaf: include the petiole or not? if there are multiple leaflets? if the leaf is ten meters long? Ask ten ecologists and you will likely hear ten different answers, all of which may seem appropriate…

After a month of fieldwork in the eastern Andes, I have arrived in Cusco for a brief contact with the wider world and wanted to share a small vignette from this project. The overall aim is to predict carbon fluxes in forests using simple measurements. Dozens of people from several universities are working on the…

It is a rare pleasure to have a scientific study covered by the popular media. We got lucky with a recent publications on leaf shrinkage and climate. Inside Science TV, an educational channel produced by the American Institute of Physics, sent a film crew to our lab earlier this year to talk with University of…

Walking on an unfamiliar city street, do you ever feel as though someone is looking at you, with eyes that are curious, desirous, suspicious, or otherwise? The feeling can be unsettling, but is a pale comparison to walking in a forest. The natural world is also full of eyes, but these eyes are hungry. Tennyson…