Category Archives: Papers

Keeping up with the literature (in your own lab)

My lab has started blogging about each other’s papers. People in our lab use quite a variety of techniques and have some pretty different research focuses. I love seeing my labmate’s work come together into a cohesive whole and I love digging into new (to me) techniques and ideas. I always learn a lot. In our blogging project, one person takes lead and writes a short summary of the paper and everyone else very briefly answers these questions:

  1. What’s your takeaway from the paper?
  2. What’s the coolest thing about it?
  3. What questions are you left with?

Joane started off the series in January and I followed this month talking about one of her papers.

The Homebrew Series: Inferring Demographic History With ABC, By Joane Elleouet And Sally Aitken

Want to know about the history of the populations you’re studying? Joane Elleouet and Sally Aitken see how far Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) and your sequencing method of choice can take you in a new paper in Molecular Ecology Resources. [more]

 

How fast did Pinaceae ranges move in the past? | The Modern Forest

Source: How fast did Pinaceae ranges move in the past? | The Modern Forest

I remade a couple graphs from Ordonez & Williams 2013 to get a better look at the Pinaceae.

It is often assumed that forcing [for budburst] does not begin until after the chilling requirement has been met and this undoubtedly is what occurs naturally in boreal regions where extended periods of cold temperatures are never or rarely interrupted by warmer (forcing temperatures) until spring. We believe, however, that chilling and forcing can occur at the same time (in the temperature range where they overlap) and both systems are accumulating ‘‘time’’ over the dormant period. The systems involved in such accumulations (named the ‘‘memory of winter’’ by Amasino, 2004) are not understood.

From Harrington CA, Gould PJ, St.Clair JB: Modeling the effects of winter environment on dormancy release of Douglas-fir. Forest Ecology and Management 2010, 259:798–808.

The memory of winter

Inertia toward continued emissions creates potential 21st-century global warming that is comparable in magnitude to that of the largest global changes in the past 65 million years but is orders of magnitude more rapid.

From Diffenbaugh & Field 2013 in Science

Sentences to make your blood run cold