Blogs

As we all began to shelter in place on March 17, Jorge Ramos began tweeting day-by-day about nature going about its business at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. If you are already on Twitter, you can find his daily posts at @stanfordjrbp . If you're not, we'll be bringing you weekly summaries here! For all of us at JRBP, these virtual... more

Wood density (the mass per unit volume of wood) is associated with mechanical support, carbon and nutrient storage, drought tolerance, pathogen defense, and water transport in trees and shrubs. Models of carbon stocks often rely on wood density estimates. Although understanding wood density variation can better inform studies of tree evolution and carbon models, ambiguity exists as to what factors... more

Kevin Leempoel, Trevor Hebert, Elizabeth A. Hadly Note: Dr. Kevin Leempoel will be presenting his latest research during our Jasper Ridge Evening Lecture series on Tuesday, March 17 at 4 PM. In conservation, faunal diversity surveys are essential to document eventual changes in diversity and abundance over time. They are, however, time-consuming, expensive, and usually detect a limited number of... more

We’re Jen and Hilary Bayer, 20-year-old twins from Palo Alto. For as long as we can remember, we’ve been exploring nature. Several times during childhood we visited Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve with Stanford student friends of our family who were docents. Since then we’ve aspired to learn more about, and contribute to work being done at the preserve. Throughout our... more

The Anthropocene has arrived, and at Jasper Ridge, we have been using a record of the past century archived in Searsville Reservoir to understand what that means. The Anthropocene is being proposed as a new geologic epoch by an international group of investigators, to recognize an emerging body of evidence that humans have changed the planet so dramatically that the... more

Ecology is full of scientific names. Escherichia coli, Homo sapiens, Canis lupis . You’ve probably heard of these before. But what about Ixodes pacificus, Dermacentor occidentalis , or Haemaphysalis longicornis ? What are these? And more importantly, who cares? The three species listed above are commonly known as the western black-legged tick, the Pacific Coast tick, and the Asian longhorned... more

Over the course of my first year at Stanford, I became increasingly interested in how people interact with their landscapes. I came to Stanford set on majoring in earth systems, but I accidentally fell in love with art history when I got here. As I navigated my first year, I began to contemplate how the sciences and the humanities overlap... more

Throughout my entire Stanford career as an Earth Systems major, I have focused on learning about the many different intersections of the ecological and human dimensions in environmental science. I still remember sitting in Earth Systems 10 during my sophomore year watching Rodolfo Dirzo’s lecture on how the study of biodiversity in Latin America is strongly connected to the country’s... more

In these turbulent times of environmental and social unrest, rigorous study, personal (and collective) appreciation, and active protection of our planet’s beautiful biological and cultural diversity, can serve as critical tools to help us address the increasingly steep trajectory of such crisis. Globally and regionally much damage has been done, but there is still much action that we can take... more

According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service around 45 million Americans are birders, so it’s a pretty good bet that you have an idea of what birders do: They wander across fields, along shorelines and through woods, peering frequently through some optical device or other, and—increasingly—tapping away on their phones to record sightings. So don’t bird photographers do pretty... more