UNSW has announced another round of our prestigious PhD scholarship competition. We have been lucky enough to have been awarded one of these. This project comes with $40,000 per year stipend and $10,000 of research funding per year (for full
Prestigious new PhD scholarship
UNSW has just announced a new program for well-funded, prestigious PhD scholarships. We have been lucky enough to have been awarded one of these. The topic is broad intentionally to attract a very good students: Climate change is impacting ecosystems
New website for teaching quantitative skills
A few of us within the BEES, including members of the Evolution and Ecology Research Centre and the Centre for Ecosystem Science, have been developing a wide range of tools to help with improving the quantitative skills of our students,
A drone image of a recently burned shrubland
turned into a point cloud
What’s happening at a pine species’ far Northern range edge?
What’s going on at at a species far northern range edge. A case study using Coulter Pine (which is pretty easy to find since it has the worlds largest pine cones). More info in this Ecography paper.
Between 45% and 48% of the world’s plant species are woody
Trying to scale up from data to estimates of the world requires a way to deal with sampling bias–we know a lot more about some parts of the world and some clades than others. More info from FitzJohn et al.
A data-driven model for the evolution of N-fixing nodulation in plants
A data-driven model of the evolution of N-fixation: the data supports one gain of a precursor, about 100 million years ago, as underlying subsequent evolution of the root symbioses. See the full paper in Werner et al. 2014, Nature Communications.
New GEB paper on the climate-independent decomposability of leaves and wood
A cool new Bayesian methodto separate the “species” part of decomposability from the climate and methods effects. Turns out that, among species, leaf decomposability is weakly but positively correlated with wood decomposability. This is mostly driven by gynomsperms–very, very recalcitrant
New paper with Andrew Letten at Methods in Ecology and Evolution
A new paper from Andrew Letten and myself on the scaling of functional and phylogenetic difference now in early view at MEE
“How do trees survive winter” video
A super cool animated video based (in part) on our recent paper.