8/13/08: Ever wonder what all of those Aphaenogater rudis ants are doing in temperate forests? Then check out this new paper by Jane Zelikova, Rob Dunn, and Nate.

8/11/08: Want to see where everyone in the lab has been this summer? Then click here.

7/30/08: Field season is starting to wind down, and everyone is gearing up for a trip to ESA in Milwaukee.

7/5/08: Nate is off to the International Entomological Congress in Durban, South Africa and then to an Argentine Ant Workshop in Stellenbosch.

6/26/08: This should've been posted a while back. But if you wanted to know how to be a good grad student in ecology, read the reply by Simberloff and Nate published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. Oh, and Greg and Martin Nuñez had some thoughts too.

6/23/08: Lara Souza is now Dr. Lara Souza!

6/12/08: Knoxville is Austin without the hype...

6/09/08: Before your next trip to Sweden, make sure you read this paper by Crutsinger, Sanders, Albrectsen, Abreu and Wardle in Functional Ecology on how ecosystem retrogression affects trophic interactions.

5/31/08: Nate is just back from a NESCent working group on montane biodiversity. Tomorrow he takes off for some field work in Arizona.

5/15/08: The lab has emptied out for the summer. Tara is at Coweeta & Harvard Forest, Mariano is in Argentina, Windy is on her way to the Grand Canyon, JP is in Japan & Spain, Greg is in California, and Maggie and Lara are holed up finishing their theses.

5/8/08: Congratulations to Windy Bunn, who just defended her Masters Thesis!

4/30/08: Phil Lester from Victoria University of Wellington is visiting the lab, giving a seminar, and checking out some of our sites (and ants) in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

4/25/08: Nate is in Boulder for Jane Zelikova's PhD seminar and to collaborate with Christy McCain on a couple of projects.

4/21/08: Greg is off to Bodega Bay to initiate a couple of new projects with Jay Stachowicz and Sharon Strauss.

4/14/08: Jon Chase is visiting the lab this week and giving a departmental seminar.

3/29/08: Ever wonder about the effects of climatic change on Banksia in Western Australia? If so, check out this new paper by Fitzpatrick et al. in Global Change Biology.

3/26/08: BIG NEWS: JP Lessard was just awarded an NSERC fellowship, and Greg Crutsinger just received an NSF DDIG!

3/25/08: Brian Inouye and Nora Underwood from Florida State are visiting the lab this Thursday and Friday.

2/25/08: It's official: Matt Fitzpatrick is now Dr. Matthew C. Fitzpatrick, PhD. Sooner than any of us want, he's off to Harvard Forest to begin a postdoc.

2/4/08: Greg is in the south of France giving a talk on community genetics. He's also drinking lots of wine and eating lots of bread and cheese.

1/31/08: Matt Fitzpatrick is gearing up to defend his PhD and start a postdoc based at Harvard Forest.

1/14/08: Happy new year! We've been slow to post, because of the addition of the newest lab member over the Holidays: Finn Marshall Sanders was born on December 17.

12/11/07: It's the end of the fall semester, and a new paper by Crutsinger, superstar undergrad alum Mellisa Habenicht, Classen, Schweitzer and Sanders was just published in Plant and Soil.

12/3/07: A new paper by Nicole Heller, Jessica Shors, Deborah Gordon, and Nate on the invasion dynamics of the Argentine ant just came out in Oecologia.

11/22/07: Just in time for Thanksgiving, a new paper in Oikos by Crutsinger, Collins, Fordyce, and Sanders on the temporal dynamics of the arthropod community associated with Solidago.

11/16/07: Greg is up at Eastern Kentucky University giving a seminar.

11/13/07: Lara, Windy, Greg led John Wiens from the Nature Conservancy around the field sites at Freel's Bend.

11/6/07: Nick Haddad from NC State is visiting the lab and giving a departmental seminar.

11/2/07: Rob Dunn and collaborators are here to begin setting up the warming experiment at Duke Forest and Harvard Forest.

10/31/07: Just in time for Halloween, check out the new paper on genotypes and genotypic diversity as barriers to plant invasions by Crutsinger, Souza, and Sanders in Ecology Letters.

10/2/07: Tara is off to Coweeta to sample top predators in leaf litter communities, then to Harvard Forest to begin a litter transplant experiment.

9/26/07: Greg is at the University of Zurich giving a talk, and Nate is at GBIF in Copenhagen at a workshop on diversity in montane regions.

9/18/07: JP and his devoted field crew have just finished harvesting a 3-month long experiment looking at the interactive effects of temperature and food addition on leaf-litter ant (and arthropod) community structure along the environmental gradient in the Smokies. Now the ID'ing begins...

9/17/07: Nate is just back from beautiful Boulder, where he visited Jane Zelikova and her committee. Matt's just back from a trip to Australia where he worked on several collaborative projects.

9/15/07: Check out this new paper in Ecology by Sanders, Weltzin, Crutsinger, Nuñez, Fitzpatrick, Oswalt, and Lane. The paper shows, using a manipulative experiment, how multiple factors can interact to shape invasions.

8/26/07: After 29 nights in the tents, 250 miles of hiking, 4 bee stings, and about 200 Clif bars...Windy Bunn (with the help of undergrad superstar Claire Brown) has finished her field work in the Smokies!

8/05/07: Kerri Crawford's paper with Greg and Nate appears in this month's issue of Ecology. Click here to check it out. And there's a nice paper in the same issue testing whether the metabolic theory of ecology can account for broad-scale variation in species richness. There are several responses to the paper that are also worth reading.

8/04/07: Windy and Lara are off to present at ESA in beautiful San Jose.

6/20/07: More big news from Canada (Quebec really): JP Lessard was just awarded a prestigious 3-yr FQRNT fellowship to support his PhD research.
And Tara Sackett will be joining the lab as a postdoc for two years, also supported a FQRNT fellowship.
Thanks, Canada!

5/27/07: Greg is visiting David Wardle's group in Sweden until October.

5/26/07: Here's a new paper by Dunn, Parker and Sanders on temporal partitioning in ant communities.

5/17/07: Check out the new paper on assembly rules in ant commmunities by Sanders, Gotelli, Wittman, Ratchford, Ellison, and Jules in the Journal of Biogeography.

5/9/07: Nate is in Copenhagen for an Ecography meeting and to meet with Carsten Rahbek's group at the University of Copenhagen.