Changes, changes

One of our new study sites in the Great Basin desert north of Reno, on a calm cloudy summer day

Congratulations, welcomes, new work

Huge congratulations to Anson Call and Stephanie Coronado for successfully defending their PhD dissertations this past spring. Anson has moved on to a postdoc at the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute in Ft Collins, where he is applying his interest in spatial ecology to fire management. Stephanie is moving to a postdoc at the University of South Florida to study more ant-plant interactions! Both are submitting and revising more of their papers for publication, and I can’t wait to see them out in the world soon.

We have two new graduate students joining the lab this fall, Joe Coolidge, who is joining us from Colgate College, and Jesper Christensen, who is joining us from fieldwork he’s been conducting with collaborators at Mpala Research Centre in Kenya. Both will begin their master’s work in a new set of precipitation manipulation experiments that we are conducting north of Reno.

Our plan is to remove and add rainfall to large-ish (4x28m) “community scale” plots in the Great Basin desert, where sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) is the foundation shrub species. We are lucky to be working with the Bureau of Land Management who manages the land, and we are learning a lot.