News

At an evening celebration in San Francisco on October 10, JRBP Staff Scientist Nona Chiariello was honored by induction into the California Academy of Sciences (CAS). She was one of 15 leading scientists elected as a Fellow this year. CAS Fellows are nominated by their peers and elected by the CAS Board of Trustees, in recognition of being “distinguished scientists... more

California’s oak savannas are iconic landscapes defined by venerable, majestic oaks that govern a wide array of interacting biotic and abiotic processes and ecosystem services. Many of these foundational oaks are declining, such as the magnificent Valley Oak at JRBP pictured above, before and after it dropped more than half of its aboveground biomass in April 2017. The striking absence... more

Stanford professor Tad Fukami has been honored with a 2017 Dimensions of Biodiversity award from the National Science Foundation to support his lab’s research on nectar microbial communities, related to three dimensions of biodiversity: functional, genetic and phylogenetic. The NSF award continues a decade of study that has involved hundreds of biology students at Jasper Ridge. Congratulations, Tad! The research... more

It has long been thought that as organisms dispersed, the difference between local communities decreased. Not so, according to work at Jasper Ridge in a recent publication by former Stanford postdoctoral researcher Rachel Vannette, now an assistant professor at UC Davis, and Stanford professor Tad Fukami. Their work used the nectar in the bright orange flowers of sticky monkey flower,... more

César award-winning documentary Tomorrow tells the story of its co-producers/co-directors, Cyril Dion and Melanie Laurent. Dion, a French activist, author and journalist, discovered a 2012 study co-authored by Stanford scientists Anthony Barnosky and Elizabeth Hadly, " Approaching a state shift in the Earth's biosphere ," published in Nature , which discussed how humankind could be suffering between 2040 and 2100... more

The field of conservation is undergoing a paradigm shift. In the face of accelerating human impacts, there is a growing consensus that for many, perhaps most terrestrial ecosystems, the goal of maintaining a historical state is no longer possible. In a new paper in Science , JRBP directors Tony Barnosky and Liz Hadly led a 41-author team that presents a... more

Our annual report recaps the year at JRBP in words, pictures, maps, and figures, and is available to view or download. With essays and quotes from more than a dozen contributors, three dozen new photographs, a list of the year's publications and honors theses, and a financial summary, the report is a window on the year's accomplishments and transitions in... more

The Jasper Ridge Global Change Experiment reports in a new publication that net primary production (NPP) of California grassland is highest when annual rainfall and temperature are near long-term averages, and falls off under more extreme conditions such as those expected with climate change. The analysis, by Kai Zhu and others, was possible because of a second finding: NPP responses... more

For his yearlong series called “Vanishing,” CNN Opinion columnist John D. Sutter turned to JRBP executive director Tony Barnosky for the long view of extinction. Barnosky is a paleontologist who has applied his research on fossil communities to determine how much of modern day extinction is within the range of natural causes, and how much can be attributed to human... more

Doctoral student Rivers Ingersoll and engineering professor David Lentink describe their experiments on hummingbird hovering in a short new video by bioGraphic. Ingersoll and Lentink are providing the first direct measurements of how hummingbirds generate the lift necessary to keep their bodies aloft and stationary as their wings beat at a blurring forty times per second. Combining high-speed video and... more