Proud to contribute to a paper by Adam Pellegrini and coauthors that was just published in Ecology Letters: "Convergence of bark investment according to fire and climate structures ecosystem vulnerability to future change" (PDF).

Our work finds that some ecosystems contain tree species that are well adapted to the predicted changes in global fire regimes due to climate change, while others are composed of trees that may be particularly vulnerable. The paper was highlighted on Princeton's homepage and in Nature News!

It was an honor to join this year's OTS (Organization for Tropical Studies) Graduate Field Ecology course last week at La Selva. This is a premier program in tropical ecology, and the course revolves around a series of short (~3 day) research projects led by students and faculty. 

Days of rain made it difficult to do much research in the forest, but there was no shortage of plants and wildlife to learn about at the station. You should read the course's blog to learn more about what everyone was up to.

Carissa Ganong and Andrew Mehring made an outstanding team of lead faculty - it was a thrill to join them!

Thanks to a new, inspiring conservation organization — Biodiversity Initiative — for inviting our lab to join research and conservation efforts in the understudied tropical forests of Equatorial Guinea.
 
Highlights from a brief visit include:

1. A workshop with government officials (and other stakeholders) to discuss opportunities to better conserve wildlife and protected areas.
2. Hiking with a bushmeat hunter to learn about the first links in the wildlife trafficking chain—the way legal trapping of wildlife by local subsistence hunters can feed into international crime through the trade of endangered species, like pangolin. (Importantly, hunting was forbidden during my visit.)​
3. The magnificence of a primary Congo Rainforest on Equatorial Guinea's mainland.