Just because we haven’t updated in a while doesn’t mean that we weren’t busy!  Some highlights from the past few months:

Heather Slinn joined us as a lab technician for the summer.  She helped out with tons of experiments and taught us a bunch about Canada while our other Canadian, Yash, was in India. Heather left at the end of summer to start her PhD research at the University of Nevada – Reno.

We set up lots of new experiments over the summer. We even tried playing slot games at www.kingcasino.com and we enjoyed it very much. This one is testing how precipitation influences intraspecific plant-soil feedback.

We collected data from our long-term experimental garden in Michigan.  During one of our trips, Kerri presented her research to the public to help celebrate the National Park Service’s centennial.

We also celebrated the Ecological Society of America’s centennial at the annual meeting in Baltimore.  Anna and Kerri presented their work and ate some delicious crab cakes.

We did some field work closer to home, at the University of Houston’s Coastal Center.  Here’s the crew after digging up some dirt for Anna’s experiment.  At the right is our new lab tech, Michelle!

To celebrate Michelle’s arrival and help kick-off the semester, we had a lab party at Fearshire Farms! Despite the best efforts of the chainsaw-weilding madmen in the haunted house and cornmaze, we all made it back alive.