We study how local processes give rise to larger patterns, and how links between scales shape forest structure and diversity.
We are based in the Department of Plant Ecology and Evolution at Uppsala University in Sweden. |
** NEWS **
2024: - Jan: We had a successful annual field campaign to Puerto Rico to census our permanent plots (except for 1 broken arm!). - Great to have our Puerto Rican seedling drought experiment paper finally accepted! Survival, growth, and functional traits of tropical wet forest tree seedlings across an experimental soil moisture gradient in Puerto Rico in Ecology and Evolution. 2023: - Congrats to former MSc student, Paschalis Chatzopoulos for his paper "Height-diameter allometry for a dominant palm to improve understanding of carbon and forest dynamics in forests of Puerto Rico.", accepted at Biotropica! - Welcome Rakesh Tiwari, a new Wenner-Gren postdoc who is working on temperature response of photosynthesis in tropical trees. - Major thanks to Silvia Bibbo for all her hard work in the group - good luck in your new position at SLU! - Big congrats to postdoc Julia Tavares for her award from the King of Sweden!!! - Congrats to postdoc Julia Tavares for her paper "Basin-wide variation in tree hydraulic safety margins predicts the carbon balance of Amazon forests" in Nature! - Congrats to Roel Lammerant, former MSc student for his paper "Water-limited environments affect the association between functional diversity and forest productivity" in Ecology and Evolution! - We were happy to have visiting PhD student, Tereza Hüttnerová, from the Department of Forest Management of the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague! 2022: - Townsend Peterson has led a new paper describing the ENM2020 online course he organized with many great contributors. Check the paper here, including links to materials including recorded video lectures, slides, and more. - There's a new publication in PNAS from the 2ndFor network (led by the amazing Lourens Poorter) on the Functional Recovery of Secondary Tropical Forests. - Samuli Lehtonen led a new work on Edaphic heterogeneity and the evolutionary trajectory of Amazonian plant communities. - Julia Tavares joined the group as a postdoc! Welcome Julia! Fall 2021: - Laura Moro begins as a new PhD student in December - welcome Laura!! - Emanuele moves to a position in the Institute of Geography at University of Mainz - We have published a major update to the ENMeval R package, including a review of how the package has been used since the original publication. Jamie Kass led this massive effort.
Spring 2021: - Spring means lots of transition in the group... - Bon Voyage to Kasia as she moves on to a Marie Curie position at AMAP in France! - Benvenuto to Emanuele Ziaco as he joins the group! - Meanwhile, Bob is spending April-July as visiting professor at Sapienza University in Rome. Thanks to Laura Parducci and Sabina Burrascano for hosting! Winter 2021: Two new collaborative papers out! First, more work on forest dynamics in Puerto Rico led by Naomi Schwartz: Topography and traits mediate tree performance and drought response in a tropical forest. In Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. Next, a review/perspective piece on woodlands in the anthropocene that was created by a truly interdisciplinary team: History as grounds for interdisciplinarity: Promoting sustainable woodlands through an integrative ecological and socio-cultural historical perspective. In One Earth. Fall 2020: I'm delighted to be awarded an early-career researcher project grant from FORMAS! Stay tuned for exciting new directions on land-use, tropical trees, and (tree) population genetics! Very excited to collaborate with my colleague Pascal Milesi on this project! New paper out on Puerto Rico forest dynamics led by the fantastic Naomi Schwartz: Topography and traits mediate tree performance and drought response in a tropical forest. Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. Lots of discussion on tree planting these days. In this new paper, Forrest Fleischman leads the arguments about why the human dimension is critical to keep in mind. Pitfalls of tree planting show why we need people-centered natural climate solutions. BioScience. February 2020: Happy to have contributed to a very cool paper led by Emily Bellis and Jesse Lasky: "Genomics of sorghum local adaptation to a parasitic plant". Now out in PNAS! January 2020: Very fun and productive field work in Puerto Rico! Finished a census of long-term forest plots and worked on our seedling drought experiment at El Verde field station. Was also great to get MSc student Roel Lammerant acquainted with the island! December 2019: Had a wonderful time back in Aarhus at the EcoInformatics Group for a workshop on "Restoring Global Forests and Biodiversity"! November 2019: Really happy to present at the Linnean Centre for Plant Biology Annual meeting! Great to meet more plant biologists in Uppsala. July 2019: A new Data Paper has been accepted at Ecology: "Palm community transects and soil properties in western Amazonia". This dataset has been built up by Henrik Balslev (Aarhus University) and colleagues over the past 20+ years. While parts of it have been used for numerous publications from Henrik's group, this is the first release of the full dataset, including data on soil chemistry and other characteristics. Hopefully this dataset will be a useful resource for people interested in palms and/or tropical soils. <LINK> June 2019: Had a great time in San Vito at the Quantitative Wood Anatomy workshop! Thanks to the instructors for such a great experience. April 2019: Another new paper from the 2ndFor group has been published in Nature Ecology and Evolution: "Wet and dry tropical forests show opposite successional pathways in wood density but converge over time" <Link>. Also check out the new 2ndFor website! October 2018: Happy to say that two new papers have been accepted! - "Effects of biotic interactions on tropical tree performance depend on abiotic conditions"(Ecology) was done in collaboration with the great collaborators Julie Messier, Richard Condit, Steve Hubbell, and Jens-Christian Svenning. <Link> - "Soil fertility and flood regime are correlated with phylogenetic structure of Amazonian palm communities" (Annals of Botany) was a really nice chance to collaborate with Christine Bacon, Søren Faurby, and Alexander Antonelli from Gothenburg University as well as my Aarhus University and @EcoInf colleagues. <Link> May 2018: New work out in Nature Ecology & Evolution from our amazing 2ndFor Network! This one led by Maga Gei: "Ecological success of tropical legumes across succession and rainfall gradients". <Link>. Also, glad to be a part of," Taxonomic revision, distribution and ecology of Wedlandiella (Arecaceae: Arecoideae: Chamaedoreeae)" <Link> January 2018: New work out from the Luquillo LTER led by Benedicte Bachelot: "Associations among arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and seedlings are predicted to change with tree successional status" in Ecology <Link>. November 2017: It's been an exciting week with three new papers accepted!!! In Uriarte et al. (Global Change Biology), we show how abiotic and biotic conditions interactively mediate climate impacts on tropical seedling survival. In Kass et al. (Methods in Ecology & Evolution), we present Wallace: a modular web-based application (available as an R package here). Finally, in Guérin et al. (Ecology and Evolution), we look at drought influences on inter-annual variation of hydraulic traits in Pinus edulis. October 2017: Back in Denmark after two fun and productive weeks at the University of Leeds working with the ForestPlots.net team on a new project! August 2017: I had a lot of fun in Portland at ESA 2017 where I presented our paper, "Demographic drivers of functional composition dynamics", which was recently accepted in Ecology. <Link> July 2017: I had two great research visits this month. First I spend a few days with Thaise Emilio at Kew in London. Then I had a great visit with Christine Bacon and Søren Faurby at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden! Lots of good science and two wonderful botanic gardens in two weeks! June 2017: It was great to participate in the ARCFUNC workshop here in Aarhus! Thanks to Signe Normand and Anne Bjorkman for organizing such a fun and productive week. May 2017: I had a wonderful time with the palm crowd at EUNOPS 2017 in Luassane! Very happy to meet nice people and get great feedback on new projects! April 2017: Back in Denmark after two big field trips. I was first in Puerto Rico to collect ground-based data to pair with the NGEE Tropics airborne initiative headed up by the NASA G-LiHT team. I am very much looking forward to this ongoing and exciting work! It was also great to meet Sasha Reed and hear more about the TRACE (first-ever warming experiment to be conducted in a tropical forest ecosystem)! I then had the pleasure of joining Henrik Balslev and colleagues on a trip to the Peruvian Amazon to check out field sites and try to absorb an absolute wealth of knowledge on palms and soils... March 2017: New article out now in collaboration with colleagues at Aarhus University: Climate change induced range shifts of three allergenic ragweeds (Ambrosia L.) in Europe and potential impact on human health (LINK). January 2017: We included a vignette with a new release of our ENMeval R package. November 2016: A new article on phenology of dry forest trees, led by Jesse Lasky, is out in Environmental Research Letters. Synchrony, compensatory dynamics, and the functional trait basis of phenological diversity in a tropical dry forest tree community: effects of rainfall seasonality (LINK). Also check out coverage on the journal's blog: Environmental Research Web October 2016: We have a new article about Puerto Rican forest diversity: Variation of tropical forest assembly mechanisms across regional environmental gradients in Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution and Systematics (LINK). September 2016: A new highly collaborative effort led by Shahid Naeem, Biodiversity as a multidimensional construct, has been accepted at Proc. of the Royal Society B (LINK). May 2016: This was a big spring for our secondary forests group! We have a new paper out in Science Advances: Carbon mitigation potential of Neotropical second-growth forest (LINK) that complements our recent paper in Nature: Biomass resilience of Neotropical secondary forests (LINK). March 2016: I have a new paper with María Uriarte in Proc. of the Royal Society B: Do community-mean functional traits reflect optimal strategies? (LINK) January 2016: Our contribution to a special issue of Caribbean Naturalist is out: Climate and biodiversity effects on standing biomass in Puerto Rican forests. LINK October 2015: See our new article out in Journal of Vegetation Science: Functional convergence and phylogenetic divergence during secondary succession of subtropical wet forests in Puerto Rico. LINK September 2015: We released a new version of the R package ENMeval that implements parallel processing! Also, thanks a lot to the Whitney & Rudgers Labs at the University of New Mexico for hosting me for awhile! June - August 2015: I had a great time at ESA giving this talk! Also, congrats to Natalia Umaña for leading a paper accepted at The American Naturalist: Inter-specific functional convergence and divergence and intra-specific negative density dependence underlie the seed-to-seedling transition in tropical trees. May 2015: A new collaborative paper lead by Susan Letcher is out in the Journal of Ecology: Environmental gradients and the evolution of successional habitat specialization: a test case with 14 Neotropical forest sites. LINK April 2015: Our submission for the GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge was selected as a finalist! I am a part of this collaborative effort with Jamie Kass and Rob Anderson, Matthew Aiello-Lammens, and Bruno Vilela. March 2015: Thanks to the organizers for putting together a fantastic BES conference in Sheffield: Demography Beyond the Population February 2015: Check out our new paper in Ecology: Lasky et al. Ontogenetic shifts in trait-mediated mechanisms of plant community assembly. LINK << GO TO ARCHIVED NEWS >> |