Check out Sydne’s latest paper that describes how to best confront metacommunity theory with long-term data streams. This paper also highlights a new data standard (i.e., ecocomDP) for community ecology generated through a collaboration with the Environmental Data Initiative that has the potential to make synthesis of disparate datasets easier. Keep an eye out for more papers on this topic coming out later this year introducing the data design standard and applying ecocomDP to data from the National Ecological Observatory Network. This work was funded by the NSF through a Long Term Ecological Research Network synthesis working group at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis.

It was great to see >250 participants at the National Science Foundation Macrosystems Biology Investigator Meeting. Sydne led the organizing committee for the meeting and chose to focus this year’s meeting theme on diversity, equity, and inclusion in collaborative team science. The all virtual meeting this year enabled twice as many early career researchers to take part. Highlights were Bala Choudhary’s keynote on ’10 simple rules to an anti-racist lab’, Sparkle Malone’s keynote on her path to becoming an ecologist as a black woman, and lightning talks and posters of cutting edge science.

Check out this new publication led by Sydne and a group of colleagues from the Long Term Ecological Research Network, National Ecological Observatory Network, and Critical Zone Observatory Network. We lay out a future research agenda linking coordinated research networks to maximize gains in understanding the Earth system.

Check out our new paper on oaks from the Harvard Forest

Wundergrad Arya Yue published her first, lead author paper based on her summer research in Singapore in 2019. Congrats, Arya!!

Congratulations again to Kyra Hoerr and Nia ‘Blue’ Riggins as they each start their first week of graduate school! Kyra is off to University of Pittsburgh to study the philosophy of science, and Blue is off to Penn State to study entomology. Best of luck to both of them.

A new paper in Proceedings of Royal Society B uses a massive data compilation of 162 datasets across the globe on fish, bird, and plant assemblages to ask how taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity has changed over time. Check it out here.

Also, the NASA bioXgeo working group co-led by Sydne has another publication out in a new book on remote sensing of plant diversity. The whole book is open access to promote open science! Check it out here.

Dr. Record was interviewed by the National Ecological Observatory Network for their women in ecology series. Check it out here.

My name is Kyra and I’m in my final year of undergraduate studies at Bryn Mawr College working in Dr. Record’s research lab. I’m interested in ecology and philosophy of science, specifically in understanding how we can model biological complexity. I’ve been working with Sydne and Rob Salguero-Gomez (Oxford University Department of Zoology) on a mistletoe demography project for about a year now and I recently visited Oxford for two weeks to help with some of the fieldwork.

The cool thing about mistletoe—and one of the reasons it’s important to study—is that it’s hemi-parasitic. This means that the plant can obtain resources both from photosynthesis and from its host tree. At the moment there’s not a lot of data on parasitic plants, but they’re important to understand because their life history strategies may differ from non-parasitic species. For example, because mistletoe plants don’t need to invest as much energy into a root system to obtain water, we might expect them to have more energy to invest in reproduction than non-parasitic plants. The main hypothesis we’re investigating in this study is that mistletoe will demonstrate weaker trade-offs in reproduction and survival than non-parasitic plants.

Investigating this hypothesis involves a lot of tromping around in the woods with various pieces of expensive equipment. On a typical day in the field, Rob, Yash, and I carried two drones, two scopes, at least one tripod, a camera, and two iPads out into the woods looking like a group of over-prepared hikers. Once we arrived at a tree, we would take a picture of it from the same spot the picture was taken last year. This makes it easier to tell which mistletoes have died and which are still on the tree. After we took pictures with the iPad, camera, and drone, we would use the scopes to identify whether the mistletoes had fruit on them to determine whether they were reproductive. And finally, we would scan the tree to find new recruits—young plants that could have only a few leaves.

Back at Bryn Mawr I spend a lot of time in the lab staring at the pictures from the field. Using the software ImageJ I can measure the relative growth of the plants from the pictures we take each year. For the past year I’ve been using these images to gather information on the growth, survival, and reproduction of each individual mistletoe over the course of several years. I’ve started to use these data in integral projection models (IPMs) that will help us to understand the demography of these populations.

One of my favorite parts of doing fieldwork this year was realizing how well I’ve gotten to know each of the host trees. Just from looking at the branching patterns and distribution of mistletoe, I can tell you the ID number of almost all 25 of them. I even have some favorite mistletoe plants (mistletoe number 38 on Tree 128 is especially cute). Spending so much time looking at mistletoe plants on a computer screen has helped me to find even very small plants when I’m out in the field. It’s a very odd skill, but one that I’m very proud to have.

Check out our new paper here from our NASA funded working group: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/geb.13061.

We found that geodiversity variables predict biodiversity more consistently than climate variables, which is interesting because climate is generally thought to be the most important driver of biodiversity. Variability in topography and elevation was the most important aspect of geodiversity for predicting both bird and tree biodiversity. However, the relationships are really most consistent within individual ecoregions of North America. (Ecoregions are areas dominated by a single well-defined ecosystem type; the Nature Conservancy has identified about 70 of them in the contiguous United States.) But the relationships vary a lot across regions to the point where it’s hard to apply geodiversity relationships from one region to another one. What we can say is that trees have a closer relationship to the topography. Places with variable elevations tend to have higher tree diversity but actually lower bird biodiversity. Birds, especially migratory birds, can seek out the highest productivity locations to breed so they are less tied to the topography.