Early Spring Quarter 2023 Our lab members have been acknowledged in various ways early this quarter, and we have reached several milestones. Grace Horne received an NSF GRFP. Congratulations, Grace! Mickie Tang and Grace are both hard at work on their thesis proposals, and seeing them shape up their research questions and plan out their PhD work has been exciting! Zoe Wood presented a poster at a recent meeting in Humbolt on her art-science fusion work with museum specimens. We’re so lucky she brings an artistic spirit and perspective into the lab. Elizeth Cinto Mejía joined the lab as a postdoc working on a USDA project to investigate how water availability might determine urban tree responses to heat islands. She’s settling in here at Davis, and we couldn’t be more excited to have her as our first postdoc! Mia Lippey is finishing up her first chapter research and is moving into more thesis work this quarter and this summer. Marielle Hansel Friedman is gearing up for fieldwork in the Shields Oak Grove this summer, an iconic part of the UCD campus where 300 out of the 500 global oak species are planted! Lauren Azevedo Schmidt plans to join us as a postdoc in Sept 2023, and we are so excited to have her expertise in fossilized herbivory in the lab. Plus, she can teach us all how to run ultra-marathons! (JK, I won’t be doing that.) I was selected as an Early Career Fellow and a Hellman Fellow. I also got an NSF CAREER Award to build a new garden in the arboretum and create art-science fusion projects around changing phenology in California. And I’m expecting my first child, a baby girl, in September. Like I said, big quarter already!
Winter Quarter 2023 Our team is hard at work in classes, designing research projects for spring/summer, and analyzing data. Check out this new paper by lead author Laura Jenny! https://bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajb2.16126
Fall Quarter 2022 We just welcomed three new Ph.D. students Mickie, Zoe, and Marielle to study various aspects of global change. Our new preprint on the effects of vehicle pollution on plant-insect interactions is available here.
Spring Quarter 2022 We just wrapped up the academic year, and wow has it been a busy and fruitful time! Emily’s collaborative exhibit at the Harvard Museum of Natural History “In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers” opened in May. Her Entomology 001 students created a ceramic mural (below) displaying insect-plant interactions in California. Snippets of both projects are in the image gallery below. Emily was awarded a USDA NIFA grant, Hellmann Fellowship, and Small Grant from UC Davis, all for different new projects. She is also close to submitting the lab’s first data paper on effects of vehicle pollution on insect herbivory.
Grace TA’d an ecology course for undergraduates while making excellent progress on her project analyzing John de Benedictus’ 30-year moth dataset from Cold Canyon and Davis. Mia continues to learn more about the extent to which landscapes around citrus fields affect pests in those fields, and she won Honorable Mention for her GRFP proposal (Big congratulations, Mia!) Dave is busy in the field collecting insects from urban trees while the rest of us write papers and grants this summer, and continue to analyze the datasets we’ve collected over the past couple years. In the fall, we have three (three!) new Ph.D. students joining us, and we’re looking forward to expanding our community,
Winter Quarter 2021 This fall quarter, Grace Horne joined the lab, and we are so lucky to have her. Emily Meineke collaborated on a symposium with Will Wetzel at the annual Entomological Society of America Conference and taught the first iteration of her Biological Control class. Mia Lippey presented a poster there on the effects of surrounding landscape types on citrus pests. It has been a great few months, and we look forward to assembling papers from the work that has been ongoing in the lab for the past 1.5 years in early 2022! We will also begin our new project recently recommended for funding by the USDA on the effects of warming and precipitation change on urban tree growth, which we hope will inform urban tree species selection as the climate continues to warm.
Feb 2021 Dave Eng just joined us to help manage the lab and conduct various projects in Sacramento and in the arboretum. Welcome, Dave! This month Emily gave a keynote talk at the inaugural NAPPN virtual meeting.
July 6, 2020 We happily welcomed Victoria Woolfolk to the lab this week! She is a senior interested in the effects of urbanization on insect herbivores.
May 16, 2020
New research initiative! Virtual Center for the Study of Biotic Interactions: a multi-campus collaborative
Learn about the Virtual Center for the Study of Biotic Interactions (ViCSBI), a new, multi-campus research initiative under development by ecologists and evolutionary biologists at UC Santa Barbara, Berkeley, Riverside, and Davis. PIs Susan Mazer, Katja Seltmann, Isaac Park, Brent Mishler, Nicole Rafferty, Emily Meineke and others are joining botanical and entomological forces to investigate the effects of climatic and other environmental disruptions on mutualistic and anatogonistic interactions in wild and agricultural California ecosystems. To understand more about our mission, please check out our overview of ViCSBI using the link below.
Related Links
Virtual Center for the Study of Biotic Interactions
1st: We are very excited to welcome Mia Lippey to the lab (virtually)! She will start her Ph.D. work in the Meineke and Rosenheim labs in Fall 2020. She is interested in the interactions between plants and herbivores, and how they are affected by proximity of farms to urban landscapes.
April 2020
1st: What a strange time to start a lab! The Coronavirus epidemic has stalled our field plans for this year, but we are working on some virtual and citizen science projects online that will launch later.
Most importantly, we’ve welcomed our first lab member Lena Wigger! Lena is a freshman at UC Davis and is interested in how climate change affects species interactions.
Dec 2019
12th: This preprint outlining the future for plant specimen digitization was accepted in BioScience. Look out for it in 2020!
Nov 2019
28th: Our exhibit at the Harvard Museum of Natural History using digital art to convey the loss of plant species in Thoreau’s Woods was formally accepted and is set to open in May 2022! Read more about this work here and here.
Sept 2019
5th: Our paper on urban biodiversity and landscape characteristics was accepted for publication in Proceedings of the Royal Society B today! The preprint is here. Loved working with the folks at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History’s BioSCAN project and hope for many more opportunities to collaborate on understanding California’s urban biodiversity.
July 2019
15th: Check out our new preprint on the future of natural history collections: Link!
13th: Jane Lucas’ paper “Azteca ants maintain unique microbiomes across functionally distinct nest chambers” was accepted for publication in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Congratulations, Jane! You can learn more about Jane here, and her new paper is previewed in the poster at the very bottom of this page.
June 2019
News for the WHOLE MONTH: I am excited to share that this work will continue in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology in 2020 where I’m joining as a faculty member!