Andean forests have high potential to store carbon under climate change. The study — which draws upon two decades of data from 119 forest-monitoring plots in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Argentina — was produced by an international team of scientists including researchers supported by the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis. The lead author was Alvaro Duque from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia Sede Medellín.
Black-and-white ruffed lemurs and diademed sifakas are the focus of Living Earth Collaborative effort in Madagascar to find out how to best support these two endangered species.
New research from Washington University in St. Louis helps flesh out the origin story for the so-called “lost crops.” These plants may have fed as many Indigenous people as maize, but until the 1930s had been lost to history.
Dr. Fangqiong Ling has won the 2020 Rising Star Award, which is presented to a promising young scientist in the field.
New research from an international team including Rachel Penczykowski, an assistant professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis shows that infection actually makes a plant more susceptible to secondary infection — in experiments and in the wild. The findings are published Aug. 31 in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
The Congo Basin is home to the world’s second-largest rainforest and a unique array of biodiversity. But the ecosystem’s remote location cannot protect it from the threat of poaching. Special correspondent Monica Villamizar and videographer Phil Caller traveled to the Central African Republic before the pandemic to report on indigenous tribal hunters working to protect endangered wildlife.
A new study co-authored by LEC Biodiversity Fellow and president emeritus of Missouri Botanical Garden, Peter Raven, appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research highlights the alarming rate of vertebrate species extinction, attributing it primarily to human activities.
Biodiversity Fellow, Bob Merz, leads the Center for American Burying Beetle Conservation . The American burying beetle is one of the few insect reintroduction projects around the country.
St. Louis Public Radio interview with LEC Biodiversity Fellow and Webster University faculty member, Nicole Miller-Struttmann about Shutterbee.
Adam Smith, Assistant Scientist at the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development, uses models to predict how climate change will reshape ecosystems. His work has uncovered startling projections, like rare plants shifting thousands of miles or Madagascar’s forests vanishing entirely by 2080. By integrating past and future climate data, Smith’s research helps guide conservation efforts, including seed banking and habitat preservation, while exploring innovative topics like urban expansion driven by self-driving cars and the importance of microrefugia for biodiversity resilience.
Monica Carlsen is one of the Missouri Botanical Garden’s aroid experts, who specializes in Anthurium research. Through a grant from the Living Earth Collaborative, she is investigating the role scents play in plant/pollinator interactions in Anthurium.
The LEC announced funding for 8 biodiversity projects, including one in Africa earlier this week.
A study published July 8 in the journal Nature Plants presents a novel model for how small-seeded plants came to the table — and it relies on help from large, grazing animals, including bison. The new work is a collaboration between Natalie Mueller, assistant professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and Robert Spengler, director of the Paleoethnobotany Laboratories at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
LEC director, Jonathan Losos, has been awarded the 2019 Sewall Wright Award by the American Society of Naturalists
Living Earth Collaborative grant supports efforts to understand if Peter’s Angola colobus monkeys represent one or two subspecies.