monkey's uncle

It was a conceptually dense week in class.  The first part of the week I spent talking about topics such as ecological complexity, vulnerability, adaptation, and resilience. One of the key take-home messages of this material is that uncertainty is ubiquitous in complex ecological systems.  Now, while systemic uncertainty does not mean that the world [...]

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As part of a series of articles on interdisciplinary environmental research at Stanford, the Stanford Report has just published a nice piece on the research on Aboriginal burning in Western Australia led by Rebecca and Doug Bird. This work is supported by a grant from the Woods Institute Environmental Venture Project fund as well as [...]

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We have a new paper out in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.  The paper suggests that subsistence related burning increases local landscape heterogeneity and may promote biodiversity in Australia’s Western Desert.  What’s really interesting about this is that promoting biodiversity is not the goal of individual hunters – they [...]

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A recent paper in PNAS documents the alcohol consumption patterns of pentailed treeshrews (Ptilocercus lowii) in Southeast Asian rainforests. These treeshrews consume fermented nectar on a daily basis from the flower buds of the bertam palm (Eugeissona tristis). The alcohol content of the fermented nectar averages 0.6% but gets as high as 3.8%. A proportionate amount of [...]

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