Check out our new paper in Frontiers in Ecology & the Environment where we discover a silver lining to the last two years: open data facilitate resilience in ecological research during COVID-19 pandemic. This paper is a product of discussions at the National Science Foundation Macrosystems Biology and National Ecological Observatory Network Science Community Meeting that I organized in January of 2021.

Sydne in collaboration with colleagues Dr. John Grady (former Bryn Mawr postdoc) and Dr. Noah Charney (University of Maine) have received ~$0.5 million from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to study scaling relationships that will help to predict understory vegetation dynamics from remotely sensed tree canopies. The project is slated to run for three years, and Dr. John Grady will return to Bryn Mawr to collaborate on the project.

Check out this new paper that is a result of a Long Term Ecological Research Network Synthesis Working Group that Dr. Sydne Record worked with. This is one is a series of papers coming out from the group. Stay tuned for another.

In collaboration with colleagues at Harvard and UC Santa Barbara, Record and undergraduates collaborating with her will use big data and machine learning on herbarium specimens to better understand plant seasonal responses to climate change. See the description of the research here on the National Science Foundation website.

Frances Romero (BMC ’22) has joined our team. Frances will be working on reconstructing land use histories of NEON sites for her senior thesis.

Check out our new paper on the geodiv R package that calculates gradient surface metrics from remotely sensed imagery. Thanks to NASA and NSF for funding this work.

Sydne had the opportunity to contribute two papers to an important forum on justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) in the environmental sciences in the journal Ecological Applications. One paper focuses on how environmental data science creates more inclusive pathways for diverse undergraduates interested in ecology. Another paper focuses on implicit biases that hinder retention of diverse faculty and outlines a path forward. Sydne and her collaborative research group at Bryn Mawr are dedicated to maintaining an anti-racist team.

Check out our new paper on showing that species distribution models transfer poorly for 108 western tree species with United States Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) data. More evidence that we need to consider processes and natural history when modeling the responses of trees to climatic change.

Check out our critique of a recent, widely publicized paper suggesting no consistent decline in North American insect populations using Long Term Ecological Research Network data, including a 15+ year ant dataset Dr. Record has been working on at Harvard Forest.

Check out our new paper looking at purple pitcher plant (Sarracenia purpurea) microbiomes across >23 degrees of latitude and >35 populations. This was a large collaborative effort with colleagues from University of Wisconsin, University of Florida Gainesville, University of Sherbrooke, University of Montreal, and University of Vermont. Thank you to funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute through Bryn Mawr College.