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3/2/2026

February 2026 News

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On February 24-25, Alex Bradley Jiménez-Martin conducted her second round of field data collection from her leaf litter bag project, with help from other lab members and Rice students. In total, 240 bags were collected from the bases of 80 trees across 2 sites. These litter bags, which have been on the ground at these sites for a full year, will be analyzed for decomposition and microbial and invertebrate communities.
Annie Finneran's first chapter of her dissertation was accepted for publication in Ecology Letters! Be on the lookout for the article, titled Food web similarity increases with productivity similarity at a continental scale.
Matt McCary’s recent manuscript submission, titled Aquatic resource subsidies are more important than invasive lupine for ground-dwelling arthropod communities around Lake Mývatn, was accepted to Aquatic Ecology, and will be available online soon. This study found that invasion was less important in the context of resource addition for ground-dwelling arthropods in Iceland.
Saheed Jimoh co-facilitated a workshop for the Ecological Society of America titled “Introduction to Sparse Modeling,” alongside Amy Patterson (University of Wyoming & University of Maryland) and Christa Torrens (Flathead Lake Biological Station). The workshops taught participants how to approach and use sparse modeling techniques, including interpreting fitted models and generating SuSie and lasso scripts in R. This workshop, which is available upon request, is supported by the Modelscapes Consortium comprising the University of Wyoming, the University of Nevada, Reno, and the University of Montana.

1/30/2026

January 2026 News

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On January 5th, Amoi Campbell was one of two Rice students who received the 2025 GSS Best Presentation Award, as chosen by a panel of EEB faculty. Their presentation, titled “In my Context Dependent Era: How Belowground Traits Outperform Aboveground Traits in an Invaded Grassland Community,” was noted as demonstrating “ability to engage a broad scientific audience while maintaining strong disciplinary depth, clear conceptual framing, and effective communication of research ideas, along with clear growth in both research development and presentation skills.”
Saheed Jimoh co-authored two new publications focused on soil carbon in grassland ecosystems. The first, titled “Resistance of shallow soil carbon to both short-term isolated and recurrent droughts in two semi-arid grasslands,” was published in Oecologia on January 7th. The second, titled “The global extent of the grassland biome and implications for the terrestrial carbon sink,” was published in Nature Ecology & Evolution on January 27th. Publication links: 1 2
Brooke Beardshall, along with other first-year EEB students, hosted an outreach booth at Bunker Hill Elementary’s Science Night on January 27th. The booth was designed to show kids how broad science can be and what it might mean to be a scientist. They walked students through the full scientific process, from collecting data in the field to bringing samples back to the lab for processing and cleaning, then analyzing the data to make scientific inferences.