A HUGE congratulations to Sam Kelly and Cessair McKinney, who completed their senior capstone in the Byrne lab during the 2020-21 Academic Year. These two senior ESM students were such a pleasure to work with - their capstone expanded into a presentation, then a manuscript, which was just accepted to the journal Ecological Restoration. We'll post an update once the article is in press. Congratulations, Cessair and Sam!

We haven't updated the lab website in awhile. Here's what we have been up to:

• Graduations: Allison Nunes successfully defended her thesis and her thesis has been approved by the graduate school. Way to go, Allison! She is currently working on getting her thesis ready for publication.
• New grad students: Francisco Chavez and Julia Bartley both started their graduate programs this summer. Welcome!
• New undergraduates: Cristina Winters and Emily Parsons are both working with graduate students in the lab this summer. Welcome!
• Field work:
  • Sean, Ethan, and Francisco went to Klamath Falls, OR to collect some continued monitoring data for our Applegate's milkvetch project.  There are very few new seedlings this summer. Jonas (Cuellar-Gempeler lab) joined in for a few days and collected soil/root samples for his thesis research.
  • Kerry, Sean, Ethan, Allison, Francisco, and Emily went to Gerber Reservoir, OR to collect data on the ORIDE project. We removed the drought shelters last fall and are now looking at community recovery from drought. The Bootleg fire started while we were doing field work!
  • Julia and Cristina are spending the summer at Teakettle Experimental Forest collecting a huge number of litter/duff and soil cores for Julia's thesis!
• Lab work:
  • ​Jonas (Cuellar-Gempeler lab) is doing a lot of lab work investigating the microbial partners of Applegate's milkvetch.   
  • Sean will quantify germination viability for Applegate's milkvetch seeds in August.
  • Francisco has quickly become a soil/root superstar: he's almost done processing numerous root ingrowth core samples

Allison will have a public talk for her thesis research this Friday at 10 am PST. Send an email to Kerry Byrne (kb33@humboldt.edu) if you'd like the link to attend. All are welcome!

Congratulations to Sam Kelly and Cessair McKinney, who gave an oral presentation on the research that they completed as part of their capstone experience at HSU. The title of their talk was "Innovation in Restoration: Estimating Seed Counts Using a Photography App." See their abstract here! We're so proud of their hard work this year!

We're so pleased to share that first year graduate student Sean Stewart has been selected as the recipient of the 2021 Humboldt State University Alistair and Judith McCrone Graduate Fellowship Award. This award recognizes one outstanding graduate student each year  to acknowledge their potential and encourage their continued achievement in their graduate program. Congrats, Sean!

The Byrne lab is hiring! See the attached job announcement for a forest restoration field technician at Teakettle Experimental Forest in the Southern Sierra. Check back in March for additional summer research technician position(s).

Big congratulations to Sarah, who was recently awarded a fellowship to study differences in phenology among California poppies in a common garden study. We're so proud of you, Sarah!

Congratulations to Allison, who just found out her talk was accepted to the 2021 Society for Range Management annual meetings [virtual edition]. Allison's talk is titled "Drought alters soil seed bank composition within a sagebrush community: decreasing native forb seeds and increasing invasive grass seeds."

It was a great week in southeastern Oregon at the ORIDE drought net experiment. We can't wait to analyze the data. Thanks to the AMAZING field crew we finished sampling in record time (see photo below). What a team! Special thanks to graduate student Allison Nunes for organizing all the details and pulling it all off flawlessly!

​Special thanks also to Dr. Byrne's partner Jason (Dr. Yost) for taking time off of work to travel to Oregon during a pandemic with a 7 month old and 2.5 year old - and watching the kiddos while Dr. Byrne was gone for 10 hrs a day. Jason was instrumental in designing/building the drought shelters at ORIDE 5 years ago and has been "voluntold" to participate in Dr. Byrne's research projects for 13 years now! What a team! 
photo credit: Allison Nunes

It's never too young to involve your children in your research! Here is Dr. Byrne collecting poppy fruits with her 2.5 year old daughter for a new collaboration with researchers from UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis, and HSU.