Matt’s project on examining the evolutionary implications of changes in wildflower phenology was nicely reported on the Newsroom blog of Washington University in Saint Louis!
rainbow: Extract weather data across a range of days/months/years from PRISM
I’m happy to announce the release of rainbow, an R package that efficiently extracts values of weather variables from the PRISM raster weather data set. Extractions can be done for multiple points using multiple daily, monthly, or annual rasters at a time and for specific windows of time (e.g., every day in a 72-day interval). …
Continue reading rainbow: Extract weather data across a range of days/months/years from PRISM
How well do species distribution models measure variable importance?
One of the most common applications of species distribution models is to identify important variables and measure their relative effect. Despite hundreds of papers assessing the predictive power of SDMs, there are none assessing their inferential power. Maria Santos and Adam recently completed the first such analysis! Smith, A.B. and Santos, M.J. Testing the ability …
Continue reading How well do species distribution models measure variable importance?
How to Protect Earth’s Biological Diversity Forever: Lessons from Maitreya Buddha, Pharma Bros, and Yucca Mountain
How can we protect species which have the potential to persist millions of years, given that we can drive them extinct within just a few decades? To answer this question, we need to look beyond conservation biology into fields such as religious studies, nuclear semiotics, and tsunami warnings. This was a invited talk by Adam …
Continue reading How to Protect Earth’s Biological Diversity Forever: Lessons from Maitreya Buddha, Pharma Bros, and Yucca Mountain
Microclimate on TV!
Our project on scaling between micro- and macroclimate was featured by local television station FOX 2! Special thanks to the Living Earth Collaborative for making this project possible!
Welcome to Matthew Austin!
We’re very happy to serve as one of the new academic homes of Dr. Matthew Austin! Matthew is a postdoc with the Living Earth Collaborative studying how climate-induced flowering phenology shifts impact interspecific pollen transfer and the evolution of mating systems. Matthew is broadly interested in how pollination systems respond to environmental variability and graduated …
Continue reading Welcome to Matthew Austin!
Integrating different types of data to infer species’ biogeographic histories
Watch our talk given at the Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America on a novel technique for integrating pollen, DNA, and occurrence data to infer biogeographical trajectories! Based on our review which won “runner-up” in Ecography‘s E4 Award: Hoban, S., Dawson, A. Robinson, J., Smith, A.B., Strand, A. 2019. Inference of biogeographic history …
Continue reading Integrating different types of data to infer species’ biogeographic histories
Welcome to Kelsey Bartlett!
We’re very happy to have with us Kelsey Bartlett, who is an undergraduate at George Washington University! Kelsey is georeferencing herbarium records of Ascelpias (milkweeds) of North America. Most these records are not georeferenced, or if they are, lack an estimate of uncertainty in the coordinates. As a result, about 90% of these records would …
Continue reading Welcome to Kelsey Bartlett!
GORP (genetics-occurrence-rhizosphere-phenotype)
We are very happy to partner with collaborators at Kansas State University and the University of Kansas to study the interdependence between the occurrence, phenotype, genotype, and rhizosphere (soil microbes) of a dominant tallgrass prairie plant, Big Bluestem (Andropogon gerardii)! This is a project funded by the US Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food …
Continue reading GORP (genetics-occurrence-rhizosphere-phenotype)
Shortlisted on The Wildlife Society’s 2020 Wildlife Publication Awards!
Our paper on spatially-varying controls of pika distributions was shortlisted (of 5 papers) by The Wildlife Society! This is a triennial award with a record number of submissions, so we’re honored, regardless of the final outcome. Smith, A.B., Beever, E.A., Kessler, A.E., Johnston, A.N., Ray, C., Epps, C.W., Lanier, H.C., Klinger, R.C., Rodhouse, T.J., Varner, …
Continue reading Shortlisted on The Wildlife Society’s 2020 Wildlife Publication Awards!