James and Tim describe their Environmental Microcontroller Units (EMUs) in UConn Today.

Ashwin Viswanathan’s paper from his PhD on how forest fragmentation disrupts interactions between plants and their soil-borne fungal pathogens is now out in Biology Letters. Nice work Ashwin!

Just out on Early View at Methods in Ecology and Evolution, a paper led by James Mickley outlining the design of an affordable envionmental microcontroller unit (EMU) that can measure and log several envioronmental variables. What’s more, the units can be constructed from easily sourced DIY electronics components that collectively cost about $20. James and the team has produced an extensive supplement detailing how to make the units and code to run them, which is available from the accompanying GitHub repository. Great work James!

We’d like to congratulate Ashwin on his job at Nature Conservation Foundation and NCBS in Bangalore, working on an atlas of Indian Birds. See his website at http://ncf-india.org/people/ashwin-viswanathan

New paper out in Global Ecology and Biogeography with Tim Moore, Matt Aiello-Lammens and Carl Schlichting showing that spatial auto-correlation leads to spurious correlations between the geographic range size and niche breadth of species, using South African Pelargonium as an example system. Read it in full at https://rdcu.be/7iHo

Ashwin Viswanathan’s PhD thesis is now available online. Read it here!

Along with our fantastic collaborators, Erin Kuperwicz and Varun Swamy we have been awarded funding to investigate how hunting of vertebrate dispersers affects tree dispersal, recruitment, community composition and traits in the Peruvian Amazon.

Shihong Jia, who visited the lab in Spring 2017 just published a meta-analysis on top-down control of plant communities by herbivores in PNAS. 

Congratulations Shihong!

A perspectives piece examing the effects of habitat fragmentation on the specificity of plant-herbivore interactions is just out in Oecologia. Read it here for free