Andrew Latimer Lab

Spring-Summer 2021

• New papers involving lab members:
  • Dudney et al. (2021) Nonlinear shifts in infectious rust disease due to climate change
  • Young et al. (2021) The utility of climatic water balance for ecological inference depends on vegetation physiology assumptions.
  • Stuble et al. (2021) The promise and the perils of resurveying to understand global change impacts
  • Wong et al. (2021) Importance of the legacy effect for assessing spatiotemporal correspondence between interannual tree-ring width and remote sensing products in the Sierra Nevada
• This spring, Andrew helped with the postfire followup resampling of UC Natural Reserves across Northern California.
• Thanks to funding from CalFire, and in collaboration with Derek Young, we have had two field crews out all summer, sampling sites affected by the record 2020 wildfires, while dodging risks and air quality problems generated by many new 2021 fires. 
• Jenny Cribbs started field work on her new project (with Joan Dudney and Andrew) to study bark beetle spillovers into high elevation forests of the southern Sierra Nevada. 

Fall-Winter 2020-21

• A bunch of new publications are coming out in early 2021. Here's one led by former lab member Melis Akman: Climate explains population divergence in drought-induced plasticity of functional traits and gene expression in a South African Protea, and another led by Mike Koontz of EarthLab: Cross-scale interaction of host tree size and climatic water deficit governs bark beetle-induced tree mortality 
• After a cluster of wildfires burned many UC Natural Reserves this August, Andrew helped organize post-fire sampling of flora and fauna at several reserves across northern CA. Thanks to Derek Young and Clancy McConnell for strong assists on the field work. 
• Nina Venuti, working with Derek and Andrew, developed a monitoring plan for the post-fire restoration activities in the Concow Basin, part of the footprint of the 2018 Camp Fire.
• Paige Kouba led this year's on-line-only "Odd-yssey" orientation program for new grad students, and Emily Purvis continued to help lead the GGE Diversity Committee's work on admissions.

Spring - Summer 2020

• The lab has committed to working harder to support Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in science and society, and have committed to taking specific actions.
• Derek Young (formerly postdoc in the lab) has been appointed as an Assistant Professional Researcher in the Department of Plant Sciences.
• Undergrad research interns Jillian Dyer and Ian Nilson graduated from UC Davis. Jillian started an MS program at UConn, and Ian is leading our field crew this summer. 
• We received a CeDAR grant to use convolutional neural networks and image regression to predict wildland fuels properties from ground-based and aerial photographs. 
• Recent lab PhD grad Marina LaForgia received a USDA NIFA postdoctoral fellowship to fund her work on seed bank dynamics and invasive plants.
• Despite the pandemic, we have been able to run two field projects this summer: one led by Derek Young (funded by CalFire) on mapping post-fire tree recruitment, and one led by Nina Venuti (funded by CalFire and Jastro funds) on the effects of wildfire on conifer tree fecundity.
• Smith Postdoctoral Fellow Joan Dudney, with grad students Jenny Cribbs and Nina Venuti, received a research grant to do research on bark beetle spillovers into subalpine forest in Sequoia Kings Canyon National Park. 

What we're doing

We study how plant populations and communities respond to change, including sudden, major disturbance such as fire and drought, as well as more gradual changes in climate. At the shortest time scales, we are focusing on how communities and populations respond to drought, fire, and competition. Over longer time scales, we study local adaptation to gradients in climatic conditions and to variability in those conditions. We collectively study all kinds of plants (forbs to forests), and things they interact with (beetles, pathogens, fungi, microbes, humans), and aim to learn by comparing the dynamics of different plant systems. We are excited about new tools, including using drone photography and machine learning, that may allow us to extend some of our research methods and ask questions at larger scales. But we stay true to the idea that the core role of scientists is to ask questions and try to answer them by collecting and analyzing data. We think and talk a lot these days about how we can contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation in our multiple roles as researchers, teachers, and citizens.