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.
“Climate change is altering when plants are blooming, and it’s disrupting the historic relationships between plants and their pollinators,” said Matthew Austin, an ecologist and biodiversity postdoctoral fellow with the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis. “But we know remarkably little about what effect that has on how plants interact with one another and the evolutionary consequences of altered plant-plant interactions.”
Postdoctoral fellow Yusan Yang shares her path to Washington University and her belief that biology is not simply a formula or rule set to be followed.
Biologist James Stroud, a postdoctoral research associate in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, discovered that the lizard community responded in an unexpected way: all of them could tolerate cold temperatures down to about 42 degrees Fahrenheit, regardless of their species’ previous ability to withstand cold.
In a paper published in Biological Conservation, a team of entomologists, including LEC postdoctoral fellow Brett Seymoure, reviewed some 200 studies and research papers to get a sense of how light pollution is contributing to insect decline.
Writing in the scientific journal Biological Conservation, Brett Seymoure, the Grossman Family Postdoctoral Fellow of the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis, and his collaborators reviewed 229 studies to document the myriad ways that light alters the living environment such that insects are unable to carry out crucial biological functions. Seymoure recommends 4 things to address this problem.
LEC postdoctoral fellow, Sacha Heath, was one of three presenters on a webinar for The Wild Film Alliance called “Supporting Beneficial Birds and Managing Pest Birds.”
To help determine forest restoration goals in Costa Rica, postdoctoral scholar Rachel Reid will travel to Central America this winter to explore a cave long inhabited by bats. The work is supported by WashU’s Living Earth Collaborative.