Students in my Belize Program presented seven posters at Scholarship Sewanee on April 28. Posters were based on the research projects that the students conducted in Belize over Spring Break in the Chiquibul rainforest and the coral reef at South Water Caye.

Brett describes his research: Dispersal has become one of the most studied traits in ecology and conservation as we attempt to understand species distributions and species resilience to environmental instability. Our paper just published in Global Ecology and Biogeography presents a new trait associated with resilience to environment instability—arboreality. Here, we show that vertical (arboreality) and horizontal (dispersal) movement are closely linked and together they incr

Coccoloba belizensis outwits a strangler fig by generating new sprouts outside the main stem that is being strangled! Basal sprouts arise from a lignotuber that continually generates new ramets over time allowing the clone to expand outward in a radial fashion. It is unlikely that the fig will ever be able to kill the entire Coccoloba clone. The power of clonality! Molly Mueller, Annie Corley and Levi Trumbore studied the importance of seedling establishment to populatio