Check out the post: https://www.brynmawr.edu/news/bryn-mawr-researchers-join-neon-shine-light-study-earths-biosphere

Sydne had a great time presenting her research on moving beyond correlative species distribution models and  meeting with collaborators on the pitcher plant genomic distribution modeling project. The team includes: Steve Keller & Nick Gotelli (UVM), Aaron Ellison (Harvard), and Russ Malmberg (U. Georgia).

Sydne attended another great LTER ASM meeting in the high country of Estes Park, Colorado. Sydne presented research performed with Tess McCabe (Class of 2016) and colleagues from Harvard Forest on the response of ant community structure to two global drivers, soil warming and nitrogen addition.

The Record Lab is hiring a postdoctoral fellow to work on a National Science Foundation funded project on intraspecific trait variation at continental scales using the first round of organismal data collected by the National Ecological Observatory Network. For more details check out the Opportunities link of this page.

Having just wrapped up research at Harvard Forest in Petersham, Massachusetts last week, Sydne and Tess are headed down to Baltimore, Maryland this week to present research findings at the 100th Anniversary meeting of the Ecological Society of America. Sydne will present research on long term data collected from tropical forests at La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica, and Tess will present research on the Harvard Forest Soil Warming and Nitrogen study. Tess received funding from a Sherman-Fairchild award to cover her travel. Well done, Tess!

Sydne Record received funding from NSF to study intra-specific trait variation of ground beetles, small mammals, and plants using data collected by the National Ecological Observatory Network. Funding will support undergraduate research and a postdoctoral fellow in the Record Lab. This project is in collaboration with Phoebe Zarnetske (Michigan State University), Angela Strecker (Portland State University), Benjamin Baiser (University of Florida), Lydia Beaudrot (University of Michigan), Mao-Ning Tuanmu (Academia Sinica in Taiwan), and Yoni Belmaker (Tel Aviv University in Israel).

F1000 Prime‘s Ian Wang, “Good for teaching, technological advance. Ecological and evolutionary research has increasingly made use of computationally intensive processes in R. This is a valuable paper with helpful suggestions for writing efficient R code and finding ways to speed up processing. The supplementary information and the associated R package for diagnosing potential problem areas are particularly useful.”

Check out the paper:

Speeding up ecological and evolutionary computations in R; essentials of high performance computing for biologists.

Visser MD, McMahon SM, Merow C, Dixon PM, Record S, Jongejans E. PLoS Comput Biol. 2015 Mar;11(3):e1004140

Empirical evidence for the scale dependence of biotic interactions