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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

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,

turned into a point cloud

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.

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 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.

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

A new paper from Andrew Letten and myself on the scaling of functional and phylogenetic difference now in early view at MEE

A super cool animated video based (in part) on our recent paper.

Some thoughts on the scaling of phylogenetic and functional difference:Slides from my recent ATBC talk are now available here. I am using a sort of experimental markdown-to-html slide generator, so if it doesn’t work in your browser please let me