News

Herbivory destabilizes plant intraspecific diversity (congrats, Mia!)

Congratulations to Mia, who published the results of an undergraduate research project on how herbivory can destabilize plant polymorphism! Typically, it is expected that…

Herbarium specimens reveal non-native spread across the tallgrass prairie over the past 130 years

Patterns of invasion are almost always studied across small areas and for short time periods. In an exciting new article, we show that non-native plants of Missouri’s…

Bees prefer complex gardens, bothered less by the city

In a recent publication, along with other colleagues, former lab REU student Evelyn Guerrero and Adam found that across an urban-suburban-rural gradient that native bees…

Next-gen biodiversity data built by community

The biodiversity data landscape is confusing! Hundreds of disparate databases, with non-standardized formats and often little description of fields and contents, and search…

How to neurodiverge in science

Neurodiversity encompasses the natural phenotypic variation found in human brain function and perception. Many neurodivergent identities impart strengths that are valued in…

fasterRaster for faster GIS in R

Within R, the terra and sf packages are the go-to solutions for geospatial analysis, but can struggle with rasters with many cells and vectors with many features. The…

Small mammal communities lag behind climate change

In a recent analysis, Lab alum Ethan Abercrombie used historical surveys by Joseph Grinnell of small mammals of the Sierra Nevada and modern resurveys to ask how well they…

Welcome, Mia!

Welcome to Mia Gaughan, the newest member of the lab! Mia comes with diverse research experience and a wealth of time in herbaria. Broadly interested in herbivory and…

The ‘Biodiversity versus solar’ dilemma

Our recent work finds that when decisions are made about where to locate new solar energy installations, biodiversity and conservation are accounted for only in a very…

Climate change widens distributional gaps

The iconic American pika ranges along the crest of the Sierra Nevada stretching from north to south–or so we thought. Published in Ecosphere, our recent work uses field…

Most-cited awards!

Two of our lab’s papers have been commended for being in their respective journals’ “top 10 most cited for 2023”! Both papers were inspired by our real-world experience in…