Lab alumnus, Tempest (Tess) McCabe (BMC ’15) published her first lead author paper this week. The paper is part of her PhD work in the Dietze Lab at Boston University. Congratulations, Tess!!

Check out the Bryn Mawr campus webpage this week, which features our new paper in Science. The lead author of the paper is Dr. John Grady who conducted the work in part while he was based at Bryn Mawr for his postdoc in the Record Lab. The paper received some great press in the Atlantic and the New York Times.

Check out the opportunities page for details.

While students in the Science and Society senior seminar were performing a peer review of their senior theses, Dr. Sydne Record had a chance to join colleagues in Knoxville, TN at the National Institute for Mathematic and Biological Synthesis to work on a book about remote sensing of plant biodiversity that will be published by Springer. Dr. Record’s contribution covers her NASA funded research investigating the relationships between biodiversity and geodiversity. Stay tuned for information about the book release next year.

Sydne had a great time at Harvard Forest last week discussing carnivorous plant traits as part of a New Phytologist working group. Here is a group picture taken by a drone from the top of one of the eddy flux towers at HF.

The Long Term Ecological Research Network All Scientists Meeting was held this past week in Pacific Grove, CA. Dr. Sydne Record presented research from a cross-site LTER REU collaboration with REUs, Kyra Hoerr BMC ’20 (mentored by Sydne) and Cameo Chillcut (mentored by Phoebe Zarnetske). Dr. Record also had the chance to run a workshop on synthesis of long term community data based on work she is doing with the LTER Metacommunity Synthesis Group at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. What a fun week of science, whales, and sun!

Nia ‘Blue’ Riggins (BMC ’20) researched the relationships between seedlings, ants, and soil pH at Harvard Forest this summer as part of the REU Program with Dr. Sydne Record. Check out her blog post about her upcoming comic book about her experience entitled, “Blue vs. Wild.”

Congratulations to Nia ‘Blue’ Riggins for her nomination as a Francis Velay Summer Research Fellow! This summer Nia is conducting summer research with Dr. Sydne Record at Harvard Forest on tree seedlings and their responses to light and soil pH. As a biochemistry major this opportunity enables her to explore the linkages between biology and chemistry through an ecological lens.

Last week postdoctoral fellow, John Grady, in the Record Lab found out that a NSF proposal he wrote for the Rules of Life program was funded! This will provide support for John to do a second postdoc with Dr. Tony Dell at the National Great Rivers Research and Education Center. Congralations, John!

Each year the Record Lab migrates to Harvard Forest for our summer field season. Check out Kyra Hoerr’s blog/podcast describing her work on reconstructing land-use histories of co-located LTER-NEON sites here.