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Lab News read an interview of Ken Feeley describing some of his research read media coverage of Ken Feeley's work January 2013 The Feeley lab will be hosting the 2013 meeting of the International Biogeography Society! http://www.biogeography.org/ http://www.biogeography.org/html/Meetings/index.html April 2012 The lab is growing! Dr. Paulo Olivas is awarded a prestigious NSF postdoctoral fellowship to work in the Feeley lab on his project "Determining the effect of climate change on the carbon dynamics of the high elevation tropical humid puna". Paulo will be joining the Feeley lab for 2-3 yrs starting in January 2013. FIU undergraduates Christine Pardo and Jonathan Valdivieso join the Feeley lab. Both will be working with Ken Feeley and Evan Rehm in Peru over the summer to investigate seed predation and seed banks in the Andean puna. Welcome Jonathan, Christine, and Paulo! March 2012 Ken Feeley is awarded a research grant by the National Geographic Society to help fund a new project investigating "Horizontal refugia and the effects of climate change on plant species distributions in the Peruvian Andes" February 2012  Tropical Biology Symposium at Fairchild.
On Saturday February 18th, 2012, the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden
hosted its first-ever symposium on tropical biology. The one-day
event, which was co-organized by Dr. Kenneth Feeley
(FIU/FTBG) and Dr. Albert Uy (University of Miami), featured a series
of talks by tropical biologists working at FIU and UM as well as a
keynote address by Dr. Scott Robinson of University of Florida. The
audience included 120+ scientists, educators, professionals and
students all sharing the common goal of increasing our understanding
and appreciation of tropical plant and animal communities. The
symposium was intended to create a foundation for future collaborations
between researchers and students at the different institutions as well
as from across the broader community of tropical biologists and will be
followed by future seminars and discussion groups. January 2012 Kenneth Feeley publishes a new article in the journal Global Change Biology entitled "Distributional migrations, expansions, and contractions of tropical plant species as revealed in dated herbarium records". The article is highlighted in Conservation Magazine's Journal Watch. read media coverage of Ken Feeley's work September & October 2011  The article "Keep collecting: accurate species distribution modelling requires more collections than previously thought" by Kenneth Feeley and Miles Silman was published as the cover article in Diversity and Distributions (Volume 17, Issue 6, pages 1132–1140). This paper illustrates how temporally auto-correlated collection biases decrease the accuracy of species distribution models and hence necessitate larger sample sizes. Kenneth Feeley delivered invited keynote lectures at the the International Biogeography Society's Early Career "Advances in Biogeography" Conference in Oxford, UK and at the VI Coloquio Estudiantil “Ecología en bosques tropicales”, in the Instituto de Ecología AC in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico. May 2011  A new article by Kenneth Feeley was published as the cover article in the new issue of the journal Ecology.
The article, entitled "Directional changes in the species composition
of a tropical forest", examines changes in the composition of tree
species growing on Barro Colorado Island, Panama. Feeley shows
that over the past 25 years there has been a remarkably consistent and
directional pattern of increasing abundances of drought tolerant
species at the expense of more drought insensitive tree species.
The cause(s) of this change remains uncertain but the most likely
culprits are either long-term changes in climate leading to reduced
water availability (i.e., increasing temperatures and reduced
rainfall), or alternatively the compositional changes may be the
ongoing legacy of an extreme El Nino drought that occurred in the early
1980's. http://www.esajournals.org/doi/full/10.1890/10-0724.1Catherine Bravo successfully passed her qualifying exams! Congratulations Catherine! Evan Rehm will spend May 2011 initiating his dissertation research project in the Andean highlands of southern Peru. Specifically he will be working with local collaborators to establish longt erm vegetation and seed dispersal monitoring plots at the ecotone between montane cloud forest and puna grasslands. Evan will leave Peru in June and July in order to attend the Organization for Tropical Studies course in Tropical Ecology at Costa Rica. Evan will return to Peru briefly in August in order to complete the summer field season of work before returning to FIU for the fall semester. Catherine Bravo will spend May – August in her home country of Peru in order research patterns of carbon allocation in cloudforest plant species. This research will help inform our understandings of the impacts of global climate change on carbon sequestration in tropical forests and will form the foundation of Catherine’s thesis project. Brian Machovia will remain in Miami over the summer in order to focus on his dissertation research investigating patterns of land conversion for Banana production in Central and South America. This research will be conducted primarily through the analysis of time series of remotely-sensed data (e.g., satellite and aerial images) combined with environmental data layers (e.g., temperature, precipitation, soil type, and topography), supplemented with field based data to be collected in the future. Bananas are one of the most widespread an important of all tropical crops yet their impact on the environment remains woefully understudied. March 2011 Catherine Bravo and Evan Rehm have been awarded Tinker Field Research Grants from the Latin American and Caribbean Center at FIU to help support their upcoming field research in the Peruvian Andes. February 2011 Conservation Magazine and Mongabay.com, two of the leading online and print sources for conservation related news, featured articles describing recent findings of Kenneth Feeley. Feeley, in collaboration with Dr. Miles Silman of Wake Forest University, analyzed the availability of herbarium-based data for tropical plant species worldwide. Overall they looked at at close to a million herbarium records representing over 100,000 species. While it may seem like a lot of information, Feeley and Silman found that the vast majority of tropical plant species are extremely underrepresented in online databases such as the Fairchild Virtual Herbarium. Indeed, most tropical plant species are known from only a single specimen. This lack of data greatly limits the ability of ecologists and conservation biologists to map the distributions of species and predict their responses to future disturbances such as deforestation climate change. These results point to the need for continued botanical exploration and collecting efforts (in the spirit of Dr. David Fairchild) as well as the need for more trained botanists that can identify and handle the specimen coming in from the field. read media coverage of Ken Feeley's work Catherine Bravo was awarded a research grant from the Sigma-Xi Scientific Research Society. The Feeley lab said goodbye to Dr. Yu Mingjian and PhD candidate Hu Guang. Collaborations will continue... Kenneth Feeley is featured prominently in a larger-than-life photograph on the side of Florida International University's crosstown bus carrying students between the main campus and the Biscayne Bay campus. January 2011 Kenneth Feeley attended the conference of the International Biogeography Society (IBS; http://www.biogeography.org/) held in Crete, Greece. The Feeley lab will be hosting the IBS 2013 meeting in North Miami. August 2010 The Feeley lab welcomes new graduate students, Catherine Bravo, Brian Machovina and Evan Rehm. The Feeley lab welcomes visitng researchers, Dr. Yu Mingjian and PhD candidate Hu Guang, both from the College of Life Sciences, Zhejiang University, China. Kenneth Feeley and Brian Machovina attended the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Pittsburgh (August 2 - 6, 2010). Feeley organized a special session on "The effects of global warming on tropical montane ecosystems" and presented a seminar on the "The extinction risks of Andean/Amazonian plant species due to deforestation". |
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