In this post John Grunseich, a Masters Student in the Helms Lab talks about his new paper Risky roots and careful herbivores: Sustained herbivory by a root‐feeding herbivore attenuates indirect plant defences out now in the latest issue of Functional Ecology.
Allyson Menzies, a Ph.D. candidate at McGill University, discusses her most recently accepted paper, “Body temperature, heart rate, and activity patterns of two boreal homeotherms in winter: homeostasis, allostasis, and ecological coexistence”, her interest in ecology, as well as the pros and cons of outdoor fieldwork.
Continue reading “Allyson Menzies: Exploring thermoregulatory strategies of sympatric species”
Timothy Perez, postdoc at the University of British Columbia, shows us his last work ‘Photosynthetic heat tolerances and extreme leaf temperatures’, explains the importance of plant tolerances under climate change and the challenge that is to do experimentation in hurricane season.
Continue reading “Timothy Perez: extreme leaf temperature and heat tolerance”Esther Sebastián-González, postdoc researcher presents her paper ‘Waterbird seed‐dispersal networks are similarly nested but less modular than those of frugivorous birds, and not driven by functional traits’, and show us how waterbirds paved her road into ecology.
Dr. Jo Carpenter, a postdoctoral researcher at Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research discusses with us her recently accepted article, “The forgotten fauna: native vertebrate seed predators on islands”, as well as her favourite part about being an ecologist and conservationist.
Continue reading “Jo Carpenter: Can introduced seed predators compensate for the loss of native seed predators on islands?”
Dr. Benjamin Blonder from University of California at Berkeley presents his last publication ‘Low predictability of energy balance traits and leaf temperature metrics in desert, montane, and alpine plant communities‘, one of his first steps in the world of thermal ecology. He shares his experience about how little actually we know about how plants manage leaf temperature and the hard but very rewarding fieldwork at Rocky Mountains.
Florian Roth, postdoc researcher talks about his paper High rates of carbon and dinitrogen fixation suggest a critical role of benthic pioneer communities in the energy and nutrient dynamics of coral reefs, what makes this work different and what got him into ecology.
![Dr. Florian Roth. [Photo credit: Yusuf El-Khaled]](https://functionalecologists.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/image4-1.jpeg?w=768)
Laura García-Velázquez, a graduate student talks about her recent paper Climate and soil micro‐organisms drive soil phosphorus fractions in coastal dune systems– the first article published from her PhD! About the paper The importance of understanding soil P cycle is likely to increase in the coming decades due to the increasing atmospheric deposition of N caused by agricultural and industrial activities. Due to this, it … Continue reading Laura García-Velázquez: Evaluating the drivers of soil P pools in coastal ecosystems
Dr. Sarah Donelan, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, discusses her paper, “Sex-specific differences in the response of prey to predation risk”, as well as her current research interests and how she became involved in ecological research.
Continue reading “Sarah Donelan: Sex-specific differences in prey response to predators”Dr. Cathy Cavallo, Ecologist and Science Communicator for Remember the Wild, discusses with us her recent publication, “Quantifying prey availability using the foraging plasticity of a marine predator, the little penguin”, a study she conducted as part of her PhD research with Monash University and Phillip Island Nature Parks. She further shares with us the importance of this work, along with some of the issues her team faced collecting fecal samples from penguins!
Functional Ecologists 