Derek – thanks in part to support from a Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) Tinker grant – is back in Panama this month working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). He is visiting a long-time collaborator, J. Enrique Moreno, a STRI researcher at the Center for Tropical Paleoecology and Archaeology (CPTA). This is Derek’s second trip to STRI-CPTA. He is back working with the Alan Graham Tropical Pollen Reference Collection, curated by the lab group of STRI Staff Scientist Carlos Jaramillo. The Alan Graham Collection represents one of the largest modern reference collections of Neotropical pollen – with reference slides of over 25,000 species. Derek will be using the collection to help identify over 100 unknown pollen morphotypes from his counts of aerial pollen samples collected from Parque National San Lorenzo. Several hundred species of plants are potentially represented in the pollen rain of this high-diversity moist forest.
Cassie Wesseln receives NSF Graduate Research Honorable Mention
Cassie Wesseln, a first-year PhD student and former undergraduate researcher in the Punyasena lab, received an Honorable Mention from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships Program (GRFP) earlier this year. The NSF GRFP is one of the most competitive national fellowships available to graduate students in their first two years of study. A belated congratulations to Cassie!
Cassie is also currently an NSF Integrated Graduate Research and Education Traineeship (IGERT) fellow. The IGERT fellowship in Vertically Integrated Training with Genomics – a Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and UIUC collaboration – included a semester in Panama (Spring 2013). As a result of the program, Cassie was able to participate in a Tropical Ecology course led by STRI staff scientists, and in seminars and field trips conducted by over thirty different STRI scientists and fellows. In four short months, she visited almost all of the STRI research stations in Panama. Cassie adds: “It was an incredible experience in which I learned a great deal about the tropical biology and the research opportunities at STRI.”
Neotropical pollen productivity and environmental change
Derek’s paper – Variability within the 10-Year Pollen Rain of a Seasonal Neotropical Forest and Its Implications for Paleoenvironmental and Phenological Research – based on his MS research – is now out in virtual print in PLoS ONE (Jan 8, 2013). Co-authored with STRI collaborator, J. Enrique Moreno, this works captures the year-to-year variation in the pollen output of one site in Barro Colorado Island (BCI). This analysis uses 10 years of the two decades of aerial pollen samples Enrique has collect from two Panamanian forests: BCI and Parque National San Lorenzo.
The paper was featured in the STRI Newsletter.
Congratulations, Derek and Enrique!