Desert Plant Succession and Fire

The largest impact of humans on deserts is grazing. In western North America, cattle have been present continuously since the 1700’s. Along the Mexican-U.S. border two large tracts of land were removed from grazing in the late 1970’s. The San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge (www.fws.gov/southwest/refuges/arizona/sanbernardino.html) was established in 1979 because it contains the headwaters of the Rio Yaqui, the largest river in Sonora, Mexico. A number of fish species and a spring snail occur in the U.S. only in this refuge. Directly south, in Mexico, Rancho San Bernardino has not been grazed since 2000 (www.cuencalosojos.org/). We are re-measuring sites first established in 2000 with the vegetation found there today. The data are repeat photography and documentation of species composition and cover. The picture below is one site in an abandoned agricultural field. Major differences are the modest increase in mesquite trees. The mesquite tree in the middle of the picture in 2000 died (probably due to winter freezing). Photos such as these will be compared in sites in riparian, desert marsh, desert scrub, mesquite forest and grassland habitats.

The fire in the Chiricahua Mountains has crossed to the western side of the mountain last Sunday or Monday (22, 23 May). It is now larger than 40,000 acres and will probably burn until the rains begin in early July (www.inciweb.org/incident/2225/).

Bob’s Desert Adventures

Now that the winter has broken and flowers are out in Rochester, and the temperature in the deserts of North America are over 90 degrees each day, the only sensible place to go is the Sonoran Desert. The Minckley lab (Robert, Bob, Roberto, Rob, Adrian and Chan) is headed to northern Sonora for the rest of May and June. No bees are out this time of year, but the perennial plants are. We will be resurveying plants on plots first established in the year 2000 to see how the species composition and cover has changed over the last decade. In 2000, all grazing and agriculture was stopped in this area. We will keep you posted.

The pictures are from Three Points, Arizona-a suburb of Tucson. Saguaro cactus (Carnegiea gigantea), left. A Prickly Pear cactus (Opuntia engelmannii), right.

The Desert Tortoises (Gopherus agassizii) were born on 9 Sept 2010.

Anolis distichus Graces Cover of Latest PNAS


A paper that I wrote with Dan Rabosky at UC Berkeley came out in yesterday’s PNAS.  We’re excited about the results of the study and the new methods introduced in our paper.  I’m also psyched by the fact that the cover features one of my favorite animals: Anolis distichus vinosus from Tiburon Peninsula in Haiti.  Anolis distichus is a highly geographically variable species that is the focus of ongoing work in the Glor lab by graduate students Julienne Ng and Anthony Geneva, as well as star undergraduates Audrey Kelly and Ryane Logsdon.  The little bugger in this photo just could not resist the urge to display right in front of my face (the photo was taken from about two feet away with a 105mm macro lens).  I’m including a large image of the cover in this post because the versions available via PNAS.org are really low quality and do little justice to the beauty of this animal.

UPDATE: More information about our article can be found in a related press release and on the Anole Annals blog.

Seminars & Workshop on High Performance Computing – update

Update from Brendan Mort:

Dr. Carlos Sosa will be visiting the University of Rochester from IBM on November 19th to give a general HPC talk, a Blue Gene presentation, and a Blue Gene workshop. The HPC talk will take place in the Gowen Room in Wilson Commons from 10-11 a.m., and the Blue Gene presentation will be in Goergen 108 from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. The workshop will be held from 1-3 p.m.

The Blue Gene workshop will demonstrate how to build and run software on the Blue Gene architecture using the DOCK6 molecular docking application as an example. Attendees of the workshop should be comfortable with a command line interface and have some experience developing or building Linux applications (e.g. working with compilers, Makefiles, etc.).

Because there is limited space available in the computer lab, please let us know by Wednesday, November 17th, if you are interested in attending the workshop. There is no need to RSVP for the two presentations.

Contact Brendan at brendan.mort@rochester.edu to sign up for the workshop.

Seminars & Workshop on High Performance Computing

Of interest to the growing number of EEB folks who make use of High Performance Computing (HPC)… Carlos Sosa, an IBM Academy of Technology Visiting Member, will present a series of lectures and a workshop Friday, November 19th on HPC using the BlueGene platform (the U of R Center for Research Computing makes one of these available to researchers, details here).

At 10am in the Gowen Room in Wilson Commons, Sosa will provide an overview of IBM’s efforts in high performance computing and a summary of some of his work in biomedical informatics at a special plenary lecture, “High-Performance Computing Solutions Development at IBM”.

From 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m in Goergen 108, Carlos will present an overview of Blue Gene hardware, software, and application porting.

Following the Blue Gene presentation, there will be a Blue Gene workshop, where demonstrations of porting and parallelizing software for Blue Gene will be given using a molecular docking application as an example. The presentations are open to all, but registration for the Blue Gene workshop will be required.  I will post registration information here when those details become available.

The Wasp Genome is Hot

Reuters’s ScienceWatch has selected the Werren Lab’s recent Science paper on Nasonia genomes as a “new hot paper.”  Their coverage includes an interview with Jack about this paper and its significance.  In other exciting news from the Werren Lab, Jack and Michael Clark received one of the University of Rochester Provost’s Multidisciplinary Award to study venom function and evolution in collaboration with Alan Friedman (protein biochemistry – URMC).

Glor Lab Returns from Summer Expedition to Dominican Republic

dr_band

Another in our series of band photos: Anthony Geneva, Rich Glor, Audrey Kelly, Ali Ossip-Klein, Julienne Ng, Ryane Logsdon, Miguel Landestoy

The Glor Lab has just returned from its largest field trip to date, with a team of seven having spent the last two weeks in the Dominican Republic. The team spent recorded behavioral data for a complex of closely related trunk anoles in varying stages of the speciation process.  We spent most of our time improving sampling of molecular, behavioral, and environmental data across a transect running along the famous Recodo Rd.  We took time on our last day for a band photo at the second river crossing on the Recodo Rd. (see our lab web page for somewhat more light-hearted take on this photo).