Lab New (Fall 2016)

Congratulations to Felicia Syer, who successfully defended her MSc thesis “Canopy gaps are hotspots for bees and rare plants in an oak savanna system of southern Ontario”.

Congratulations to Kathryn Tisshaw(undergraduate lab member) who recently completed an internship at the Archbold Biological Station in Florida, and is now working as a restoration ecology intern at Golden Gates National Park Conservancy in San Francisco CA.

Congratulations to Dr. Jenny McCune, who published her first Liber Ero postdoc paper in Journal of Applied Ecology “Species distribution models predict rare species occurrences despite significant effects of landscape context”. Jenny’s article received press coverage in The Waterloo Record, The Cambridge Times, and the University of Guelph news feed(“Guelph researcher uses computer model to pinpoint rare plants”).

Welcome to two new MSc students – AnnaLisa Mazzorto and Aleksandra Dolezal – who will both be exploring diversity-ecosystem services research on conventional farms in southern Ontario. Thanks to ALUS and OMAFRA for supporting their work!

Welcome to our four new undergraduate research students – Miki Tamblyn, Britney Firth, Rachel Carveth, and Dan Engelking. Each is exploring the impacts of trait variation on aspects of species coexistence and ecosystem resilience.

Welcome to Dr. Eric Lind (University of Minnesota) who is visiting our lab in late September. Eric will be giving a departmental seminar “Combining distributed experiments heterogeneous data, and hierarchical modelling for global inference in grassland ecology”.

Our Nutnet paper “Addition of multiple limiting resources reduces grassland diversity”, with Stan Harpole as lead PI, was published in Nature on September 1.

Our Blair Flats research prairie – six years after planting