Monday, December 11, 2017

Trait-based ecology in the Rocky Mountains

--- Daniel Laughlin

I am thrilled to be working in the Botany Department at the University of Wyoming. Kara and I settled into Laramie this summer, and are really loving this small college town that is full of friendly folk and surrounded by native prairie and forested mountain ranges.

My lab studies how plants function to understand where they grow, how they interact, and how they change the world. In other words, we integrate ecophysiology and community ecology to predict community dynamics and restore wild landscapes.

We develop quantitative approaches to understand and predict how plant species and communities respond to global change and test trait-based models that translate ecological processes into statistical frameworks to predict how communities assemble along environmental gradients and how species interact at local scales. We study how traits differ among and within species, how traits influence demographic rates and drive species sorting along environmental gradients, and how traits determine the outcome of species interactions.


The goal for this work is not only to gain a deeper understanding of basic ecological processes, but also to inform the restoration of degraded ecosystems, which is one of the most important applied challenges for ecology. The science of restoration ecology strives to develop general principles to guide the practice of restoring ecosystems. Our long-term goal is to develop empirically-sound trait-based methods to restore urban and wild landscapes.

Alice Stears joined the lab this fall to pursue her Ph.D. in Ecology. Alice is interested in the effects of climate change on native plant communities. She will be asking how phenotypic traits influence species growth and survival rates in response to interannual climatic variation. Yearly variation has always been a feature of western climates, but extreme weather events are becoming the new norm. Alice’s work will determine which phenotypes will win and lose in response to these variable years.

Dr. Löic Chalmandrier will be joining the lab as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Spring semester. Löic will be working on integrating species interactions into the Traitspace model of environmental filtering to improve our predictions of community assembly.

Laughlin Research Lab website: www.plant-traits.net

Departmental webpage: http://www.uwyo.edu/botany/people/faculty/david-laughlin.html

Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Students present research from the Paleontology's Great Debates (BOT 1101) class

Were dinosaurs warm blooded or cold blooded?

Why did Carnotaurus have such wimpy arms?

What caused the Permo-Triassic Mass Extinction?

What did our early human ancestors eat?

These topics and more were the focus of posters presented May 4, 2017 in the Geological Museum as the culmination of Botany 1101: Paleontology's Great Debates.



Over the course of a semester focused on finding, evaluating, and synthesizing scientific information, first year seminar students chose their favorite paleontological controversy, researched it, and designed a poster that presented multiple sides of the controversy, picked a side, and then proposed next research steps. Lively discussions were had around all posters.

Thursday, March 23, 2017

In Memoriam: Martha Christensen (1932-2017)

---by Dennis H. Knight


Former students, colleagues, conservationists, and many friends were saddened to learn that UW Professor Emerita Martha Christensen passed away on March 19th in Madison, Wisconsin. She was 85 and fully enjoying her retirement years, driving her elderly friends to their appointments in her solar-powered Chevrolet Volt, entertaining visitors with her easy laugh and warm interest in their activities, joining friends on frequent bird-watching trips, and serving on an advisory board for the University of Wisconsin Arboretum. Martha retired from our department in 1989, but she continued to study her incomparable collection of soil micro-fungi with the support of the Pfizer Corporation and the National Science Foundation. Her last publication, in 2011, was titled, Soil fungi: a new perspective. In 2013 she received the prestigious Johanna Westerdijk Award from the Westerdijk Fungal Biodiversity Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Martha came to the University of Wyoming in 1963 after receiving her Ph.D. in fungal ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was the first woman to join the Botany Department faculty. In the first year she taught mycology, dendrology, plant morphology, and general botany. There was essentially no time for research during those early years, but Martha’s persistence and abilities led to her being elected president of the Mycological Society of America in 1988. Other honors included “Woman of the Year” from the University of Wyoming Student Association (1971), the William A. Weston Award for Teaching Excellence from the Mycological Society of America (1991), and the Outstanding Former Faculty Award from the UW College of Arts and Sciences (1997). She was a generous supporter of our department, initiating endowments for the H.T. Northen Summer Fellowship and the C.L. Porter Summer Fellowship.

A world-renowned expert on Penicillium and Aspergillus, Martha examined soil micro-fungi in different types of soils and in different kinds of plant communities, finding many new species. She also studied mycorrhizal fungi, the fungal diseases of honey bees and bats, microbial sources of ice nuclei in clouds, fungi as indicators of past environments, and the fungal component of soil crusts in deserts. Supported by numerous grants, she published over 60 research papers and served as a mentor for 22 graduate students. Her students (listed below) were employed by Humboldt State University, Northern Arizona University, San Diego State University, University of California-Riverside, University of Colorado, University of South Florida, University of Wyoming, Coors Brewing Company, Scotts Lawn Care, and various community colleges, public schools, businesses and consulting firms.

Martha had a way with words. In an essay published in 2011, she described an experience that occurred when she delivered her collection of fungal isolates to a world-class depository in the Netherlands (Centraalbureau voor Schimelcultures). For the first two sentences she wrote, “New habitats create new species, I declared—as though it was a newly discovered phenomenon. My host remained quiet for a moment, and that in part may explain why I remember the occasion so well.”

As another example: “I was hired [at UW] after Dr. Bill Solheim [her predecessor in mycology] heard me give a talk on Mortierella vinacea—a beautiful little fungus that lives and works in forest soils. Perhaps I had an edge over the other applicants because I played the viola. The Solheims and Northens liked classical music and apparently there were only three other violists in Laramie at the time!  At the first orchestra rehearsal, I was seated in the first chair!  Music at UW was fun for me during the next 30 years.”

Martha had a deep interest in classical music, playing in orchestras wherever she lived. And, to the delight of everyone, she played tunes on an ordinary saw at Botany Department parties.

Aside from fungi and music, Martha was an avid outdoors person, backpacking into wilderness areas and taking bird-watching trips to Africa, South America, Australia and Europe. She was also a bold watchdog of how Wyoming public lands were being managed. With frequent letters to the editor and reviews of National Forest management plans, she was admired for her tenacity in keeping land managers honest about their management decisions. In one of her letters about forest management she quoted Goethe (1749-1832), who wrote, “Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action.” In another she urged readers to ask for the protection of all remaining roadless and wilderness areas in our national forests.

Martha was a generous member and leader of numerous conservation organizations, and she was featured in the book, Ahead of Their Time: Wyoming Voices for Wilderness.

Her family suggests that memorials be sent to The Nature Conservancy or the Wyoming Outdoor Council.

Martha is survived by her twin brother, Dr. James Christensen, and his wife Carol of North Liberty, Iowa, and two nieces and a nephew and their families.  An obituary can be found at Laramie Boomerang.

Students receiving their M.S. or Ph.D. degrees with Martha:  Jack States, Kum Hung Lee, Daniel Dolenc, Darwin Davidson, Maron Davis, Anthony Panalsek, Arla Scarborough, Andra Cassidy, James Halfpenny, William Shelby, Richard Fresh, Celeste Lupi, Dennis Clarke, Phoebe Holzinger, Robert Brown, Michael Allen, Beverly DeVore, Joan Rose, Terry Henkel, Peter Stahl, Julie Hicks, and Dorothy Tuthill.

Memorial Service for
Dr. Martha Christensen
A memorial service for Dr. Martha Christensen will be held on Saturday afternoon, April 1, 2017, at the Heritage Congregational Church, 3102 Prairie Road in Madison, Wisconsin. Family members will greet her friends at 1:00. A service of remembrance will begin at 2:00. Her friends are encouraged to bring photographs of Martha. Planning for a memorial service in Laramie is underway. Condolences may be sent to the family at www.cressfuneralservice.com

Monday, February 20, 2017

Rocky Mountain Herbarium Ranks Highly in Nation, World

Source: UW Institutional Communications

The University of Wyoming’s Rocky Mountain Herbarium (RM) ranks in the top 2 percent of herbaria in the U.S. and in the world, according to a recent report.  Founded in 1893, the RM, housed within the Department of Botany, contains 1.3 million specimens from around the world.

Friends of the RM was formed in October 2015 to raise awareness of the RM through public events and activities, and to establish a volunteer program to increase the rate of specimen processing.

Since the volunteer program’s start in January 2016, volunteers have logged more than 5,000 hours to help process a backlog of more than 300,000 specimens, says Charmaine Delmatier, volunteer program director. She says more help would be welcomed. “You don’t have to be a botanist to volunteer,” she says. “We train you, and you get to pick your own hours.”

To volunteer, go to the RM on the third floor of the Aven Nelson Building, or call Delmatier or Curator Ernie Nelson at (307) 766-2236.

Entire press release can be access from: UW Herbarium Ranks Highly in Nation, World | News | University of Wyoming

Monday, February 13, 2017

Botany Professor Katie Wagner's work on fish evolution highlighted by UW

Dr. Katie Wagner "and fellow researchers from Switzerland’s University of Bern and the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology have demonstrated for the first time that the rapid evolution of Lake Victoria cichlids -- brightly colored, perch-like fish -- was facilitated by earlier hybridization between two distantly related cichlid species from the Upper Nile and Congo drainage systems."

Different species of fish, called cichlids, swim in East Africa’s Lake Victoria.
More than 700 cichlid species have evolved in the Lake Victoria region
over the past 150,000 years. (Florian Moser Photo)
This research was published in the journal Nature Communications
DOI: 10.1038/ncomms14363

Read the complete story at:

UW Researcher Helps Solve Fish Evolution Mystery | News | University of Wyoming