Master’s student Iris Garthwaite defended her MS and ALSO was awarded an NSF GRFP and an NAU Presidential Fellowship this week! Big things ahead! We’re so lucky to have you in the lab Iris!
Congrats Yazhmin, Wyss Scholar for the Conservation of the American West!
Master’s student Yazhmin Dozal was selected as a Wyss Scholar this year! Yazhmin will work with the National Forest Foundation as a policy intern with ESP and Wyss alum Sasha Stortz this summer, and will go on to great things in conservation leadership (after finishing her research!).
New paper – community consequences of phenotypic plasticity
J.R. Jeplawy, H.F. Cooper, J. Marks, R.L. Lindroth, M.I. Andrews, Z.G. Compson, C. Gehring, K.R. Hultine, K. Grady, T.G. Whitham, G.J. Allan, and R.J. Best. 2021. Plastic responses to hot temperatures homogenize riparian leaf litter, speed decomposition, and reduce detritivores. Ecology 102:e03461. link
Riparian ecosystems are shaped by leaf litter traits that depend on both local adaptation and plasticity across a climate gradient. MS student Joann Jeplawy used 6 populations and 3 common gardens of Fremont cottonwood across Arizona.
She found that trees growing in hot conditions made small and fast-decomposing leaves, whereas cold conditions allowed trees from different origins to express a wide range of traits and decomposition rates.
And leaf traits and decomp rates matter for aquatic detritivore communities, shaping abundance, diversity, and composition. So, how will climate change affect stream communities? Past evolution and current acclimation in foundation species both play a role!
Congrats Yazhmin, CEFNS Distinguished Senior!
Congrats to undergrad researcher Yazhmin Dozal, the Distinguished Senior for the College of the Environment, Forestry, and Natural Sciences (CEFNS)!
New US FWS grant, come be our new MS student and save the world from crayfish!
We’re recruiting a fully-funded Master’s student to find ways to save the Southwest from invasive crayfish! In collaboration with David Ward and Charles Drost at #USGS_SBSC, and with funding from @USFWSSouthwest. 
Congrats Lauren and Joshua!
Congratulations to undergrad researchers Lauren and Joshua! Presenting their poster and video at the 2020 University Virtual Symposium poster, they earned the First Place Award for the Department of Biological Science, made possible through the contribution of the Craig Family Elevate Award for Sciences.
Lab grads!
So proud of the lab’s first MS and BS students graduating this spring!
Joann Jeplawy defended her MS in Environmental Sciences & Policy on The impact of genotypic vs. environmental variation in leaf litter on aquatic community assemblage and decomposition, presented at the Society for Freshwater Science annual meeting, and is off to Denver for paid-post-grad-school employment! It’s going to be a great paper!
Morgan Andrews finished her BS in Environmental Sciences with a Hooper Undergraduate Research Award and a poster presentation at the Society for Freshwater Science on her long list of outside-the-classroom accomplishments, and is headed off to work with the USGS in Washington State. We will miss you Morgan!
New paper on parasites and trophic cascades
So great to see this paper out from Jaime Anaya-Rojas and our collaborators at eawag and the Eizaguirre Lab. A predator’s phenotype affects its trophic impact, but what affects the predator’s phenotype? Gross worms in their eyeballs! Read the paper in Ecology here. Congrats Jaime!
New paper on plasticity, predation, plants, and the evolution of coloration in isopods
Thrilled to see Moritz Lürig‘s fantastic dissertation work out in the Journal of Animal Ecology (preprint here)! Supported by the ETH center for Adaptation to a Changing Environment and working in the Matthews lab at Eawag (Switzerland), Moritz looked at both diet and stickleback predation as drivers of camouflage on short and long timescales. More work on the fish side of this equation coming in the future!
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