August 2026 News

• On August 15th, Annie received the Rice Biosciences Graduate Student Outstanding Publication Award for her first dissertation chapter published in Ecology Letters, Food Web Similarity Increases With Productivity Similarity at a Continental Scale. See paper here. 
• Annie also had photos from her camera traps in Costa Rica, part of her second dissertation chapter, published in a new book, Costa Rica's Rainforests by Scott Wesley Shumway. See an image of a jaguar below!
• On August 21st, the Biosciences department held its annual Welcome Symposium for new students. Amoi was one of the primary speakers, delivering a talk on their belowground plant trait research. Iliana also presented a poster, Keep Calm And McCary On, during the afternoon poster session.
• As of August 24th, two new undergraduate assistants, Gracie Lee and Alara Seeborg, have joined the lab. They will spend this semester primarily assisting Annie with identifying thousands of invertebrates from her soil samples taken in Tanzania last year.
• On August 25th, after much preparation, the first round of live ticks (100 in total) for Modeline’s third chapter project was delivered to the lab! They were used for a preliminary experiment to test whether ticks can successfully survive in Modeline’s controlled microcosms in the incubator. We are now awaiting 750 more to be delivered in late September for the beginning of the true experiments.
• As of August 26th, a new paper on which Matt is a coauthor has been published in the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America. It is titled Growing an Inclusive Ecological Professional Society for a Diverse Environmental Workforce: Wisdom Gained to Navigate Current and Future DEIJ Challenges, and it highlights the work of the Black Ecologists section and others who have improved diversity initiatives at the Ecological Society of America. This paper can be found here. 
• Saheed is also coauthor on a new publication this month, titled A global dataset of key traits for plant belowground functioning, published August 29th in Scientific Data. This paper introduces the UNDERground Plant Organ Trait (UNDERPLOT) database, a global dataset unfrying fine-root, rooting depth, clonality, and bud bank traits to advance comprehensive analyses of belowground functional diversity. It can be found here.