Amazon Forest Interconnected: 530 students, 18 counties, 20 simultaneous professors

The changing Amazon forest

Long-term monitoring of distributed, multiple plots is the key to quantify macroecological patterns and changes. Here we examine the evidence for concerted changes in the structure, dynamics and composition of old-growth Amazonian forests in the late twentieth century. In the 1980s and 1990s, mature forests gained biomass and underwent accelerated growth and dynamics, all consistent with a wide...

Poverty and Employment in Forest-Dependent Counties

One of the most controversial aspects of federal and state policies aimed at protecting old-growth ecosystems is the potential effect of job losses on local economic conditions. A fundamental question for historically forest-dependent areas is whether these policies will result in local economic stagnation and enduring pockets of poverty. This study uses monthly, multicounty time series data to...

Students’ Ratings of Professors: The Teaching Style Contingency for Latino/a Professors

This article examines the influence of gender, ethnicity (Latino/a or Anglo), and teaching style (lenient or strict) on students’ perceptions of professors teaching a social science course. Undergraduates read and responded to a syllabus and rated the course and the instructor on dimensions such as warmth, knowledge, and political bias. Contrary to previous research, there were no significant e...

A Horny Dilemma: Sex and Friendship Between Students and Professors

Climate drivers of the Amazon forest greening

Our limited understanding of the climate controls on tropical forest seasonality is one of the biggest sources of uncertainty in modeling climate change impacts on terrestrial ecosystems. Combining leaf production, litterfall and climate observations from satellite and ground data in the Amazon forest, we show that seasonal variation in leaf production is largely triggered by climate signals, s...