Gray's Flora of North America

Managing Cognitive Overload in the Flora of North America Project

The Flora of North America (FNA) is a large-scale collaboration involving over eight hundred scientists working together to create a 30-volume compendium of all naturally occurring plants in North America. The size and complexity of the project result in significant cognitive overload which comprises not just information or data but also work practices and activities. We view FNA as a distribut...

Predicting species' range limits from functional traits for the tree flora of North America.

Using functional traits to explain species' range limits is a promising approach in functional biogeography. It replaces the idiosyncrasy of species-specific climate ranges with a generic trait-based predictive framework. In addition, it has the potential to shed light on specific filter mechanisms creating large-scale vegetation patterns. However, its application to a continental flora, spanni...

Admixture in North America

The history of North America has been marked by the encounter of populations from different continents. The discovery of the New World began a period defined by human migrations at a much larger scale than in previous history. This movement of people, voluntary or forced, changed profoundly the human landscape. As populations came into contact, admixture followed in varying degrees depending on...

Medicine in North America

Outside North America

ions and first-class procedures We've seen two ways to express the square-root computation as an instance of a more general method, once as a fixed-point search and once using Newton's method. Since Newton's method was itself expressed as a fixed-point process, we actually saw two ways to compute square roots as fixed points. Each method begins with a function and finds a fixed point of some tr...