Author: larakueppers

Congratulations to Dianne Quiroz who completed her masters in ERG, examining whether conifers hosting bacterial endophyte communities in their foliage influence the relative abundance and phylogenetic structure of taxa in those communities. She is now polishing her results for publication. Also, a belated congratulations to Adam Hanbury-Brown for passing his qualifying exam! It covered tropical forest dynamics, as well as California elk populations and the people who have a stake in managing those populations – typical ERG stuff… 😉

This summer, second year PhD student Rachel Ward visited research partners at the tropical forest research station on Barro Colorado Island, where she spent her days collecting and processing material from litterfall traps on islands’ 50-hectare forest dynamics plot. The long-running litterfall dataset is central to her Masters project, which probes correlations between tree species’ functional traits and their allocation of energy to reproduction. 

Lots of us were in the field this summer – seeking new field sites, collecting data in existing ones, and taking samples that will be the subject of additional work over the coming months. Several highlights to follow… In addition, before speaking at the International Association in Landscape Ecology World Congress in Milan, Lara visited the Dolomites in N. Italy where she saw old wildflower friends (Silene acaulis) and met new ones (Aquilegia atrata).

Sophia Bagshaw, who is graduating with honors in Environmental Sciences from the College of Natural Resources at UC Berkeley this month gave a terrific presentation on her honors research, “Coast Redwoods and Climate Change: Age-based Differences in Hydraulic Traits.” She worked closely with postdoc Tom Powell and will present her results again at the Ecological Society of America meeting in Kentucky this summer. Congratulations Sophia!

Kudos to Nancy Freitas, who works with Margaret Torn and others in Alaska to uncover the response of arctic lake sediments to warming. She is a finalist in UC Berkeley’s Grad Slam and is competing today to move on to the UC-wide competition! Richard Barnes, another ERGie, is also competing. Good luck to both of you!

Want to work with a top-notch team of scientists to understand how diverse tropical forests will be affected by climate change? Are you a whiz with complex biogeochemical or ecological datasets? Interested in improving how ecology is represented in Earth system models? ¿Hablas Español? If you’ve got your PhD in hand or will have it soon, we’re looking for you! Apply now to be an NGEE Tropics Postdoctoral Scholar.

Congratulations to Meredith Jabis for filing her dissertation! This hard won accomplishment is just the start. She has a paper in review and two more in development, with ambitions to expand her analyses of GLORIA (Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments) data from RMBL and other sites in the Western US.

Postdoc Tom Powell just published a terrific new paper in New Phytologist! He used the ED2 vegetation demographic model to show how hydroclimate variability contributes to tropical forest functional diversity, which in turn makes forest biomass resilient to many drought scenarios. This is exciting work for a number of reasons: 1) Tom developed model parameterizations that allow coexistence of tree functional types competing for both light and water in a tropical forest, 2) the modeled forest structure and dynamics meet benchmarks collected over many years at Barro Colorado Island, Panama, and 3) the predictions suggest that compensation by co-occurring trees can buffer drought impacts on aboveground biomass — except if the dry seasons become much drier.

A new paper from our climate change experiment is just out! It shows that establishing limber pine seedlings host a different microbiome in their shoot and root tissues than that found in mature trees. It also shows an increased abundance of bacterial taxa thought to have anti-fungal properties in their roots, particularly when we watered the seedlings. Dana Carper, a PhD candidate in collaborator Carolin Frank’s lab led the study.

 

Congratulations to Adam Hanbury-Brown and the rest of the ERG Masters class of 2018! Adam’s master’s thesis included an interactive web map with information on Roosevelt elk foraging, bedding and migration areas to support emerging efforts to study and manage elk populations in Northern California.