December 21, 2016
William R. Kenan, Jr., Distinguished Service Professor David Jablonski, with his former postdoc Shan Huang, Geophysical Sciences alum Kaustuv Roy, and collaborator James Valentine at Berkeley, has published a paper in The American Naturalist titled, "Shaping the latitudinal diversity gradient: New perspectives from a synthesis of paleobiology and biogeography." Combining large datasets on living and fossil marine bivalves, they show that a better understanding of the most dramatic biodiversity pattern on Earth, the increase in the number and variety of species from poles to equator, requires integrating two rival approaches to incorporate both local environmental controls and the spatial movement of species out of the tropics. They argue that such "perfect storms" for mutually reinforcing factors underlie many of the major patterns in the history of life, from the great mass extinctions to the dominance of flowering plants in most terrestrial settings.
December 01, 2016
Former postdoc Won Chang, now an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati, and associate professor Liz Moyer have a new paper out in which they predict that climate change will lead to smaller but more intense storms in the US. This result utilizes a statistical approach they developed to identify and track storms in meteorological data or high-resolution model simulations.
November 28, 2016
A number of our faculty including Liz Moyer, Sue Kidwell, David Archer, Tiffany Shaw, Malte Jansen, Doug MacAyeal, David Jablonski, and Noboru Nakamura were featured in Environmental Research and Sustainability banners banners on the University Quad. Their quotes highlight the importance of environmental research to the University and the future of humanity.