Science museums are often thought of as educational institutions, dedicated to broadening the horizons of the public. But museums also serve an important role as research institutions that make collections and store them. Until I began working in museums this past year, I wasn’t able to appreciate this fact. Biological collections represent invaluable data sources…

Go exploring in the higher latitudes of North America and you may find yourself in a forest that look like this one below. Small hardwood trees and an understorey dominated by royal ferns (Osmunda regalis). This ancient-looking scene hides a more interesting story. Here the ground is swampy and often spotted with small pools of…

Networks are now used to describe all sorts of systems – social worlds, protein interactions, food webs, and so on. For example, here you see a litter of marmot pups, where a network could be used to describe relationships between each individual animal. These networks are useful because they allow us to identify interesting structures…

After a beautiful seven weeks, the time has come to leave the mountains and depart for more civilized and less magical parts of the world. So a short valedictory to my summer home, the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. Here is the lab’s home: the townsite of Gothic, once home to a small mining town. We…