News
Undergraduate Research Intern Interest Form
This form is intended to give us the basics on your experience and interests. Depending on our hiring opportunities, we will contact you to request more information. If you're interested in opportunities to participate in the research in our lab, please fill out this form.
Spring-Summer 2022
- Coming soon: a lab form for undergrads to use to indicate potential interest in working with members of the lab. Our goal is to lower the barrier to expressing interest and broaden the number and range of candidates we can consider when new internship and/or employment opportunities open up.
- More new papers: Hannah Fertel's paper (with Jan Ng!) on spatial patterns of tree seedling regeneration in frequent-fire forests.
- Funding news: CALFIRE's Forest Health Grant Program awarded two new grants to support our projects: One led by Derek Young is funding research on early posture dynamics in the 2020 and 2021 wildfires. This project will also help support Nina Venuti's related research on how fire injury affects tree cone and seed production. The other led by Andrew is a collaboration with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to use our field data to improve the FATES ecosystem model and use it to evaluate climate change and management scenarios for California forests. Field crews for both projects are just getting started to visit a range of fires from old ones that burned >20 years ago up to new 2021 fires.
- Paige Kouba has begun running an experiment at Quail Ridge to test effects of elevated CO2 on oak seedlings. She's also lead instructor for one of our undergraduate ecology courses in S2022.
- Emily Brodie, who will graduate this June, has accepted a postdoctoral research position with the U.S. Forest Service Region 5 research division.
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.
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.