News

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... 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

“Demain (Tomorrow)” ( Demain trailer ), an award-winning, uplifting documentary about solutions to the world’s environmental problems, was shown in Palo Alto on Sept 30, one of its first screenings in the US. The film was inspired by a scientific study led by JRBP Faculty Director Liz Hadly and Executive Director Tony Barnosky, who are featured in the film and... more

Chris Field, JRBP’s faculty director since 2005, will become director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, effective September 1. Chris’s contributions at Jasper Ridge span four decades. His research began a year after the preserve’s formal designation, and he has since authored 78 publications reporting research at JRBP, more than any other individual. As faculty director, Chris emphasized... more

Three new publications illustrate the breadth of JRBP research on microbes and their roles in ecosystem processes, disease ecology, and ecological interactions. Reporting on studies from the Jasper Ridge global change experiment, LeRoux et al. report on a diverse guild of soil bacteria—nitrite oxidizers—which help regulate the availability of nitrogen to plants and the loss of nitrogen from ecosystems. By... more