Press & Media

Research in the lab has been featured in several documentaries, seminar series, and public talks . . . watch us and read about us via several of these links!

| Lab Documentaries | Read & Listen – Press and Radio | Watch – Seminars, public talks, & interviews

Lab Documentaries

PBS NOVA – Hunting the Hidden Dimension. Watch many in the lab in action here, most of our footage and interviews start at 41:00 minutes into the show. The film features us in tropical forests of Costa Rica and Brian and colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute.
National Geographic – X-Ray Earth – watch the lab in action in the mountains of Colorado making physiological and ecosystem measurements. Looks like NatGeo is good at taking down copies from YouTube but you can at least watch us here at about 50 minutes in.
Book – “In the Beat of a Heart“ For a year we had a book author and reporter travel with us on various field excursions and stay with us in the lab to go through theory. The end result is a science featuring many in the lab. It is a popular press book entitled “In the Beat of a Heart” by Nature news writer John Whitfield and was reviewed in Nature here. The book “combines biography, history, science and nature writing to capture the exciting advances— and the people who are making them—that are triggering a revolution as potentially important to biology as Newton’s insights were to physics.” You can find reviews here on Amazon.com and read most of the book via google here.

Read and Listen – Various press on research and radio interviews

Many Plant Species Are Very Rare, Vulnerable to Climate Change
Protecting large animals such as elephants and whales, and large plants like the sequoias, has a disproportionate positive impact on the health of the planet and resilience to climate change
What the future holds for biodiversity on our planet – 2020 NPR Radio Interview.
Hotter and Drier With a Chance of Extinction: Forecasting Biodiversity With Big Data
Arizona plant researchers laying groundwork for species forecasts
Predicting how forests will respond to climate change – 2020 NPR Radio Interview. How changes in global temperature will affect our forests. Connecting with other researchers around the world to make detailed measurements of trees and soils to predict the impact of climate change on the Earth’s ecosystems.
UA Part of ‘A-Team’ to Reduce Climate Change Extinctions
North American forests unlikely to save us from climate change, study finds. Our 2016 publication received much international attention in print and radio, see here for a complete listing.
A Big Database and Big Models Pave the Way for Big Questions in Ecology – Methods in Ecology
Of Life’s Laws And Unity – National Public Radio
Form Follows Function in Plant Temperatures – Researchers at the UA have found that, despite popular belief, plants are built to regulate their own temperature.
Supercomputing Helps Ecologists Overturn Popular Theory – High Performance Computing (HPC) wire.
Biodiversity Is More Than Just a Numbers Game, A new approach to biodiversity resurrects old questions.
Life is more than a roll of the dice
Meteorite That Doomed Dinosaurs Remade Forests, National Science Foundation Press here, Science Daily Press here, PLoS BIOLOGY press A Plant’s Guide to Surviving the Chicxulub Impact
Dry Leaves Reveal Past Climate Conditions – Inside Science TV – an educational channel produced by the American Institute of Physics. Dry Leaves Reveal Past Climate Conditions. Accurate measurements of leaves better reconstruct ecosystem environments.
What Will The World Look Like 50 Years From Now? – Huffington Post (VIDEO)
Size and Age of Plants Impact Their Productivity More Than Climate, UA Study Shows
Visualizing Forests of the Future
Were Dinosaurs Cold-Blooded or Warm-Blooded? Neither, Study Finds – Our Science paper was picked up by numerous press outlets, read them here
One Tree’s Architecture Reveals Secrets of a Forest, Study Finds
Four UA Professors Elected as AAAS Fellows
What’s so Unique About the Tropics?
Seeing the Forest Through the Trees
The Lifeblood of Leaves: Vein Networks Control Plant Patterns – Vein Networks Control Plant Patterns
Nature Blog – Using fossil leaf veins to reconstruct past climates
Nature Book Review – Biology’s Big Idea
Forests Around the Globe Follow Same Biological ‘Scaling’ Laws, UA Ecologist Reports in April 5 Nature
New York Times – Science Times – A Matter of Scale
Nature News & Views – All creatures great and small

Watch – Various seminars, public lectures, and interviews

Climate change, predicting the fate of our forests, & tropical ecology

Our Rapidly Changing Biosphere – Public Talk, College of Science 2020 #UAScience #CatalystsOfChange series. What does the future hold for the biodiversity of our planet, and why should we care? Ecosystems connect the biosphere’s living and physical components through the flow of energy and the cycling of nutrients—and ecosystems sustain society. Throughout, the talk I emphasize the factors that promote and maintain biodiversity as well as why change in the biosphere is accelerating. Many questions remain: what is the future of the biosphere and biodiversity on an increasingly human dominated planet? And how much time do we have left to promote a sustainable earth?
An introduction to trait-based ecology – 2020 Plant Functional Trait Course This lecture provides an overview and introduction of trait based ecology. The addresses – Why trait based ecology? It is argued that traditional ecological measures based on species richness has not adequately captured the level of generality and predictions required to make biodiversity science predictive. Traits more directly link how species perform in differing environments. Traits enable a more predictive ecology. This lecture introduces several focus research questions and some of the core literature.
The concept of time in biology, and the unity of life 2017 Oxford Martin Visiting Fellow Talk. Here I introduce a second concept of time – physiological time. Physiological time enables us to better understand why we age, the emergence of disease and cancer, the functioning of ecosystems, and the diversity of life. Physiological time is one of the most significant characteristics of life and helps unite the study of biology. A deeper question is what ultimately sets the pace of life and the search for a universal biological clock that unites life’s cycles is the most intriguing Holy Grail of biology. Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, UK.
UA Researchers Study Climate Change Effects In Amazon Trees – Radio Interview, local NPR station KUAZ, Tucson – Nov. 2013, Scientists from the University of Arizona are part of an international research team looking at how climate change is affecting trees in the Amazon. Listen and read more here. Note, in the interview I was just coming down with some Peruvian flu!
Climate change and the fate of our forests – 2014 Aspen Ideas festival via Huffington Post. New advances in bioinformatics and mathematical modeling enable us, for the first time, to answer the question ‘what will the forest in my backyard look like?’ This presentation, produced in concert with the local Aspen Center for Environmental Studies, is cutting edge both in analyses and technological interface, and will demonstrate what we will experience over the coming decades if action on a grander scale is not taken.
Life on Earth: By Chance or By Law? Public Talk, College of Science 2015 ‘Life in the Universe‘ series organized by the College of Science at the University of Arizona. Is life on earth and diversity governed by chance or are there deeper rules at work yielding a more predictive biology? You can watch my talk here or download it for free from iTunes here.
“Professional Models” interview – filmed in-between sessions at the 2014 Ecological Society of America meeting in Sacramento, CA – a #mathematical #biology interview series discussing the role of math in biology and inspiration for conducting science as well as an overview of metabolic scaling theory and “what is 3/4 scaling all about?”.
Experimental Allometry & Evolution of Allometry – Homage to James H. Brown. Talk given at BrownFest – a homage to Jim Brown and Astrid Kodric-Brown
“Biological Networks and the Scaling of Plant Form, Function, Diversity, and Ecology” – Harvard University Center for the Environment. A higher quality feed may be found here
Extending Metabolic Scaling Theory by Incorporating the Diversity of Network Geometries in Biology – The Santa Fe Institute symposium on: Simplicity, Complexity, and Unity.
In the age of Darwin, are there general laws in biology and should we even care? Talk part of a symposium at the University of New England. Available via Apple iTunes store here.
Big Data meets Darwin’s “entangled bank”: The macroecology of botanical diversity. Part one is here and part two is here – Oct. 2014, Biology Seminar McGill University, Montreal Canada.
Better Forecasting Our Ecological Future: Taming Big Data with Big Theory – The 2014 Santa Fe Institute Science Board Meeting.