February 2026 News

• 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.