The Record Lab
University of Maine
Understanding the drivers of the distribution and abundance of life on Earth across scales of space, time and biological organization
Recent news:
March 2024
Liz Amador presents research on spectral detection of Nitrogen in pitcher plants for the Maine Association of Wetland Scientists
Sydne joins the Long Term Ecological Research Network's Emergent working group at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
February 2024
New proposal funded by the Northeastern States Research Cooperative to apply our forest scaling and remote sensing work in the state of Maine to assess wildlife habitat connectivity
Liz Amador and Sydne's working group at the new NSF Environmental Science Innovation and Inclusion Lab Synthesis Center receives funding to study Macrophenology
Isaac Shepard and Liz Amador presented at the NSF Macrosystems Biology Community Virtual Meeting
January 2024
New paper out in the Journal of Ecology laying out the theoretical basis for our NASA funded project, "Life History Scaling in a Tropical Forest"
New paper out in Nature Ecology and Evolution from our NSF-funded Macrosystems Biology phenology award, "Plasticity and not adaptation is the primary source of temperature-mediated variation in flowering phenology in North America"
Sydne presents the UMaine School for Biology and Ecology Seminar on January 19th
December 2023
Sydne presented our work on harmonizing community ecology data and NEON land use at the LTER PI Meeting as examples of LTER-NEON synergies
October 2023
Welcome to new postdoc Dr. Adam Eichenwald. Adam joins us after completing his PhD at Tufts University. Adam will be working on our NASA-funded forest scaling project.
September 2023:
Sydne and Marcos are off to West Virginia to work on synthesizing forest biodiversity data as part of a NSF-funded workshop.
A warm welcome to new PhD student Jill Fedarick. Jill is working with Sydne and Dr. Christina Murphy on modeling yellow lamp mussel distributions.
August 2023:
Isaac and Sydne presented at the Ecological Society of American in Portland. Sydne also taught a workshop on integrating community ecology data from the Long Term Ecological Research and National Ecological Observatory Networks and co-organized a fun session on intraspecific trait variation.
June 2023:
Liz is off to the Mountain Lake Biological Station for SPEC school.
The University of Maine awarded Sydne an 'Enhanced Mentoring Program with Opportunities for Ways to Excel in Research (EMPOWER) Fellowship' for the coming year to advance her leadership skills and research.
May 2023:
Marcos is off to Harvard Forest to mentor in the Summer Research Program in Ecology and collect year seven of our ForestGEO seedling census.
Liz, Isaac, and Sydne are excited to attend the first Environmental Data Science Innovation and Inclusion Lab Science Summit in Boulder, Colorado. Liz will stay on in Boulder to attend the NCAR-NEON working group meeting.
Sydne presented our research on forest scaling at the NASA Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems Joint Workshop and Biodiversity Science Team Meeting in College Park, Maryland.
April 2023:
Sydne presented our research on macroecology for the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics' 'Paving the way for continental scale biology: connecting research across scales' webinar for their forthcoming report.
Liz Amador presented her undergraduate research at the Benthic Ecology Meeting in Miami, Florida.
Sydne and postdoc Isaac Shepard headed to Oak Ridge National Lab to a LENS RCN meeting to teach a workshop on our forthcoming roads data product derived from NEON LiDAR data and visit the Smokies (GRSM NEON site).
Congrats to J. Marcos Rodriguez for an excellent presentation of his MS proposal!
March 2023:
Check out the Special Feature on Ecological Forecasting in the March issue of Methods in Ecology and Evolution that Sydne organized with colleagues Carl Boettiger and Christy Rollinson. The overview editorial is here.