In collaboration with Chris Philipson at ETH Zurich (lead PI), we have been funded to examine how biodiversity affects ecosystem multifunctionality at a landscape scale in degraded forests in Borneo.

The Bagchi lab, in collaboration with Dave Wagner and Chris Elphick at UConn and Mike Singer at Wesleyan, have been funded by the National Science Foundation to work on understanding how diet breadth of lepidopteran caterpillars is modified in fragmented forests in New England. Read more at NSF’s website. Loads of opportunities for graduate and undergraduate projects.

We welcome Jia Shihong, who joined the group as a visiting scientist from the Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Shihong will spend his time in the group analysing his data on the roles of biotic and abiotic factors in shaping seedling community dynamics at Changbaishan Mountain in northeastern China.

Val Milici was awarded $4000 towards her research on fungal-plant interactions along a tropical precipitation gradient from the Tinker Field Graduate Research Fund. Congratulations Val!

James Smith successfully defended his thesis on “Scaling Biodiversity to Ecosystem Services: Spatial Genetic Structure and Carbon Sequestration Potential in Tropical Forest Trees”

I am looking for a graduate student (PhD or MS) to start in the fall of 2017. For more details, please follow the join us link for grad students.

Congrats to James Smith for his paper “Predicting the terminal velocity of dipterocarp fruit” published online by Biotropica.

Claire (ETH Zurich) has just published a paper from her PhD on the fine-scale spatial genetic structure of Dipterocarps using data from India, Malaysian Borneo and the Seychelles. Congrats Claire!

I am looking for grad students (primarily PhD but also Masters) to start in Fall 2016. See the Join Us page for more information.