Lab News

June 2023: Chhaya Werner's PRYER paper, "Year effects drive beta diversity, but unevenly across community types", is accepted for publication in Ecology.
May 2023: Mary Ngugi Waithira passes her MSc examination at the University of Nairobi, based on dissertation work on KLEE controlled burns.
April 2023: Truman's note, "High mountain wanderings" is published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
March 2023: On Truman's first(!) trip to Asia, he visited the ForestGeo project at Danum Valley in Borneo, hosted by Alex Karolus. This project is part of the network of 50-ha plots that started with the iconic plot in Panama (where Truman worked in the 1990s), and that recently added a plot at Mpala, Kenya.
February 2023: Truman visits colleagues and gives a talk at the The Africa Center for Sustainable Ecosystems and Societies under Global Change at Colorado State University: "Economic Justifications for Conservation: A Useful Tool but a Foolish Foundation?", and attends the Front Range Student Ecology Symposium (FRSES), as a presentation judge.
January 2023: Harry Wells starts a postdoc at Princeton University, working with Rob Pringle and Dave Wilcove to explore patterns and ecological impacts of rewilding and the use of restoration as a tool to understand ecosystem processes.
January 2023: Harry Wells' KLEE and UHURU paper, "Wild herbivores enhance resistance to invasion by exotic cacti in an African savanna", is published in the Journal of Ecology, and gets the Cover.
December 2022: Truman joins the Board of Directors of the Greater Arkansas River Nature Association (GARNA).

December 2022: Exciting News! Felicia Keesing, one of the first researchers to work in KLEE, and author/co-author of 20 KLEE publications, is awarded the 2022 International Cosmos Prize! Previously awardees include E.O. Wilson, Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, David Attenborough, Stuart Pimm, Peter Raven, and Jane Goodall. Congratulations, Felicia!

October 2022: Truman visits collaborators and gives a talk at the Global Change and Sustainability Center at the University of Utah: "Deconstructing the conservation-development paradigm, and reconstructing it in an African savanna"
October 2022: Mary Waithira Ngugi's KLEE paper, "Fire and herbivory interactively suppress survival and growth of trees in an African semiarid savanna", appears in Fire.
August-September 2022: Truman makes an extended research trip visit the Kenya Long-term Exclosure Experiment (KLEE).
August 2022: Chhaya Werner is interviewed by Oregon Public Radio about ecosystem renewal after the removal of the Elwah River dams.
August 2022: Jen Balachowski takes a position as Sustainability Science and Communications Lead for the start-up NCX.
July 2022: Alex Palmerlee is awarded a Conservation Innovation Grant (CIG), from NRCS, for "Developing targeted land management practices for effective and cost-efficient oak restoration" (w/ collaborators Kurt Vaughn, Valerie Eviner, and Truman Young).
June 2022: Truman rafts the San Juan River with the UC Davis EcoGeo course, having in previous years joined them on the Grand Canyon (twice) and the Yampa-Green.
June 2022: Carmen Ebel's KLEE paper, "Herbivory and drought reduce the temporal stability of herbaceous cover by increasing synchrony in a semi-arid savanna" appears in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
May 2022: Isabel Pérez Postigo (from Almut Arneth's lab at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) presents the poster, "Herbivore impact on savanna vegetation in Kenya", at the 2022 Living Planet Symposium (European Space Agency) in Bonn, Germany, based on satellite telemetry of the KLEE and UHURU plots.
April 2022: Truman becomes an affiliate of the Graduate Degree Program in Ecology (GDPE) at Colorado State University.
April 2022: Alex Palmerlee's paper, "Drill-seeding blue oak acorns: testing the (cost-)effectiveness of a new restoration technique across years and microsites" appears in Ecological Restoration.
March 2022: A second paper from the 2018 KLEE burns, "The effects of large mammalian herbivory, previous fire, and year of burn on fire behavior in an African savanna" appears in Ecosphere and gets the Cover photo.
March 2022: Duncan Kimuyu, Ryan Sensenig, and an army of helpers (including five NSF-supported REU undergraduates) completed 36 controlled burns in KLEE, the third set since 2013.
February 2022: The mega-authored paper led by Marta Sperandii, "LOTVS: a global collection of permanent vegetation plots" (including the KLEE data set) appears in the Journal of Vegetation Science.
February 2022: Another Harry Wells KLEE paper, "At high stocking rates, cattle do not functionally replace wild herbivores in shaping understory community composition", appears in Ecological Applications.
February 2022: : Harry Wells' KLEE paper, "Less is more: Lower cattle stocking rates enhance wild herbivore habitat use and cattle foraging efficiency" appears in in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
January 2022: "Altering native community assembly history influences the performance of an annual invader", by Manon Hess et al. appears in Basic and Applied Ecology.
January 2022: Harry Wells joins the KLEE research group as a post-doc.
December 2021: Chhaya Werner accepts an Assistant Professor position at Southern Oregon University. Congratulations, Chhaya!
November 2021: Mary Waithira Ngugi (University of Nairobi) begins her MSc research on post-fire survival and growth in acacias, supported by KLEE.
August-September 2021: After a long COVID-induced delay, Truman finally gets back to visit the KLEE project in Kenya (and visits Elise Buisson in Avignon).
Aug 2021: Russ Huddleston takes a position as an Ecologist (Wetlands Section) at US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
July 2021: "Large herbivore loss has complex effects on mosquito ecology and vector‐borne disease risk " by David Tchouassi, Baldwin Torto, Rosemary Sang, Corinna Riginos, and Vanessa Ezenwa, a fascinating paper on mosquitoes in KLEE, appears in Transboundary and Emerging Diseases.
June 2021: Another Harry Wells KLEE (and UHURU) paper, "Experimental evidence that effects of megaherbivores on mesoherbivore space use are influenced by species’ traits" is accepted for publication in Journal of Animal Ecology.
May 2021: Harry Wells' KLEE paper, "Cattle and large wild herbivores increase local diversity of smaller vertebrates, but less than additively", appears in the Journal of Applied Ecology.
April 2021: The KLEE paper, "Naïve plant communities and individuals may initially suffer in the face of reintroduced megafauna: an experimental exploration of rewilding from an African savanna rangeland". appears in PLOS One.
March 2021: Eric LaMalfa's KLEE paper (w/ Kari and Corinna), "Browsing wildlife and heavy grazing indirectly facilitate sapling recruitment in an East African savanna" is accepted for publication in Ecological Applications.
February 2021: Grace Charles' KLEE paper, "Termite mound cover and abundance respond to herbivore-mediated biotic changes in an African savanna", is accepted for publication in the Ecology & Evolution.
January 2021: Laura Morales accepts a post-doc at World Agroforestry-ICRAF (formerly the International Center for Research in Agro-forestry) in Lima Peru, emphasizing ecological resiliency.
December 2020: "Absentee owners and overlapping home ranges in a territorial species" (vervets at Mpala) is accepted for publication in Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology.
November 2020: Kelly Gravuer publishes "Invader-resident relatedness and soil management history shape patterns of invasion of compost microbial populations into agricultural soils" in Applied Soil Ecology.
October 2020: A paper from KLEE by Chhaya Werner et al., "Synergistic effects of herbivores and repeat fire on spatial heterogeneity of prescribed burns and their consequences for tree saplings", is accepted for publication in Ecology. Two Ecology papers in one year for Chhaya!
September 2020: Another review led by Elise Buisson, "A research agenda for the restoration of tropical and subtropical grasslands and savannas", is also accepted for publication in Restoration Ecology. This is the third in a series of review articles from this group, all accepted in Restoration Ecology in the the last few months.
August 2020: A review led by Elise Buisson, "Key issues in north-western Mediterranean grassland restoration", is accepted for publication in Restoration Ecology.
July 2020: Truman (barely) survives his tenure as Chair of the Graduate Group in Ecology.
July 2020: A second mega-authored synthesis (using KLEE data) by Enrique Valencia et al., "Synchrony matters more than species richness in plant community stability at a global scale", is accepted for publication in PNAS.
June 2020: The mega-authored synthesis (using KLEE data) by Enrique Valencia et al., "Directional trends in species abundance over time can lead to a widespread overestimation of asynchrony", is accepted for publication in the Journal of Vegetation Science.
June 2020: Keita Decarlo and Kelly Caylor publish a new paper from KLEE, in Geoderma: "Effects of crack morphology on soil carbon flux dynamics in a dryland vertisol."
June 2020: Starry Sprenkle accepts a position as Restoration Science Director at Conservation International.
May 2020: The group paper, "Myth-busting tropical grassy biome restoration" appears online in Restoration Ecology.
April 2020: Chhaya's other great April achievement: Varisha Lupin Werner Latson.
April 2020: Chhaya Werner's review paper, "Year effects: inter-annual variation as a driver of community assembly dynamics", appears online in Ecology.
April 2020: Amid the COVID-19 muddle, our French colleagues return to France, nearly on schedule.
March 2020: Judith Sitters' KLEE paper, "Megaherbivores reverse negative effects of cattle on soil carbon and nutrient pools" appears in Nature Sustainability, with a nice commentary by Mark Ritchie, and additional coverage here (in Science), and here.
February 2020: Several lab alums converge on the annual meeting of the Society for Range Management in Denver: Kari Veblen, Lauren Porensky, Corinna Riginos, Steve Fick, and Truman. Lauren was a Plenary Speaker!
February 2020: Katie Stuble's latest PRYER publication, "Priority treatment leaves grassland restoration vulnerable to invasion" is published in Diversity.
January 2020: Great news! NSF has funded the next five years of KLEE, as the first half of our decadal proposal: “LTREB: Stability and resilience in the face of multiple interacting press and pulse disturbances of a changing world (Kenya Long-term Exclosure Experiment: KLEE)”. Core collaborators/PIs are Duncan Kimuyu, Wilfred Odadi, Kari Veblen, Lauren Hallett, Amy Wolf, and Ryan Langendorf.
January 2020: With support from the France-Berkeley Fund, Avignon Université, and UC Davis, Truman and Val Eviner begin hosting a visit from restoration ecologists Elise Buisson, Manon Hess, Aure Durbecq, Renaud Jaunatre, and Julie Braschi of Avignon Université (and allied universities).
December 2019: Truman Young and Mark Schwartz publish "The Decade of Restoration is an impetus to get it right" in Conservation Science and Practice.
November 2019: Chhaya Werner's paper, "Decreased snowpack and warmer temperatures reduce the negative effects of interspecific competitors on regenerating conifers" appears in Oecologia.
October 2019: "Thresholds are in the eye of the beholder: plants and wildlife respond differently to short‐term cattle corrals" by Kari Veblen and Lauren Porensky appears in Ecological Applications.
September 2019: At the International Meeting of of the Society for Ecological Restoration in Cape Town, South Africa, Truman co-leads a workshop on Priority Effects in Restoration, with Cara Nelson and Elise Buisson.
September 2019: Truman's review of Rewilding (Eds. Nathalie Pettorelli, Sarah M. Durant, and Johan T. Du Toit. Cambridge University Press) appears in the Quarterly Review of Biology.
September 2019: Eric LaMalfa and Kari Veblen's KLEE paper, "Tree resprout dynamics following fire depend on herbivory by wild ungulate herbivores", appears in the Journal of Ecology.
September 2019: Stuart Graham's paper, "Effects of land-use change on community diversity and composition are highly variable among functional groups", based in part on KLEE, is published in Ecological Applications.
August 2019: At the Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Louisville, Kentucky, Truman meets up with Collaborators Amy Wolf, Katie Stuble, and Lauren Hallett.
August 2019: Kevin Welch takes a position as an environmental scientist for the Climate and Energy Program at CAL FIRE.
July 2019: After a delay of several years, our article on Ecological Restoration came out in Encyclopaedia Britannica(!).
June 2019: Derek Young receives a Mistletoe Research Fellowship.
June 2019: Truman floats the Yampa-Green with a group of ecologists, hydrologists and geologists (and a resource economist) from UC Davis, (and gets tossed).
May 2019: Kurt Vaughn and Clare Ray welcome Odin into the world!
May 2019: Elizabeth Forbes's review (with KLEE co-authors), "Synthesizing the effects of large, wild herbivores on ecosystem function", appears in Functional Ecology.
April 2019: Truman visits Chhaya Werner and Jon Chase at iDiv in Leipzig, Germany.
April 2019: Lauren Porensky receives one of four 2019 Early Career Research Scientist Awards from ARS (Agricultural Research Service).
February 2019: Derek Young’s paper, "Post-fire forest regeneration shows limited climate tracking and potential for drought-induced type conversion", is published in Ecology.
February 2019: Grace Charles takes a position as a Research Scientist with the Surgo Foundation in Washington, D.C.
January 2019: Bode Kelly Veblen joins his sister Marea in Logan, Utah.
January 2019: Wilfred Odadi is awarded a two-year FLAIR fellowship from the Royal Society (London).
January 2019: Malcolm Norths' "Tamm review, Reforestation for resilience in dry western U.S. forests" appears in Forest Ecology and Management, with three ex-Young lab members as co-authors.
December 2018: All my chicks have fledged, and soar high above and far afield.
November 2018: Brad Bergstrom’s grand survey of Mpala rodents (including KLEE) appears in Ecosphere: “Searching for cover: soil enrichment and herbivore exclusion, not fire, enhance African savanna small-mammal abundance”.
November 2018: Jen Balachowski accepts a position at the US African Development Foundation (as part of her Presidential Management Fellowship).
November 2018: Chhaya Werner is awarded her doctorate. Congratulations, Chhaya!
November 2018: Nature Ecology and Evolution published Sally Koerner’s monster meta-analysis on the effects of herbivores on plant communities, including data from KLEE (“Resolving variation in herbivore effects on plant biodiversity– dominance as a global mechanism”).
November 2018: The multi-lab synthesis, “Conservation and management lessons from large-mammal manipulations in East Africa – KLEE, UHURU, and GLADE” appears in The Year in Conservation and Ecology (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences).
October 2018: Kelly Gravuer gets married (to Jeff Le), and accepts a position as an AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow with the EPA in Washington, D.C.
September 2018: Chaya Werner accepts a post-doc with Dr. Anu Eskelinen at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research, Leipzig (and Finland). Congratulations, Chhaya!
August 2018: Ghost-doc Amy Wolf accepts a tenure-track position at the University of Texas, Austin. Congratulations, Amy!
July 2018: Laura Morales’ paper, “Differential seedling regeneration patterns across forest-grassland ecotones in two tropical treeline species (Polylepis spp.)” comes out in Austral Ecology.
July 2018: Ecology and Evolution accepts for publication Wilfred Odadi’s paper, “Cattle preferentially forage on African savanna termite mounds, but not when they share habitat with wild ungulates”.
June 2018: Truman takes over as Chair of the UC Davis Graduate Group in Ecology. What was he thinking?
May 2018: Our synthesis paper, “Relationships between cattle and biodiversity in a multi-use landscape revealed by the Kenya Long-term Exclosure Experiment (KLEE)”, is published in Rangeland Ecology and Management as an Editor's Choice.
April 2018: Katie Stuble’s lab paper on year and site effects in California restoration (“Every restoration is unique”, which appeared in the Journal of Ecology last July, is named a “Highly Commended Paper” (short-listed for the Southwood Prize)
March 2018: Ecological Applications publishes a paper by Corinna Riginos et al.: “Herbivory and drought generate short-term stochasticity and long-term stability in a savanna understory community”, summarizing stability and resilience patterns from 20 years of KLEE data.
February 2018: Duncan Kimuyu and Eric LaMalfa (w/ Truman and Chhaya and an army of assistants) carry out 36 controlled burns in KLEE.
January 2018: Duncan Kimuyu is awarded a prestigious Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellowship. Congratulations, Duncan!
January 2018: The KLEE project is awarded its third NSF REU grant, the second senior-authored by UCSB grad student Elizabeth Forbes. UC Davis undergraduate Grace Lewin will be joining her this summer in Kenya.
December 2017: Gilfred Powys, naturalist extraordinaire and mentor to many, was killed by an elephant on his ranch in Laikipia, Kenya.
December 2017: The only UC Davis awardees for this year’s prestigious Presidential Management Fellows (PMF) Program (and 2 of the 3 of ecology applicants nationally) are from the Young Lab: Grace Charles and Jen Balachowski. PMFs are fast-tracked for career jobs in the federal government. Congratulations Jen and Grace!
December 2017: Lab paper on the restoration implications of priority (wrapped around a summary of PRYER results) is published Restoration Ecology (after being online for 18 months!).
November 2017: Derek Young is awarded his doctorate in Ecology, and starts his postdoc with Andrew Latimer. Congratulations, Derek!
October 2017: Lauren Porensky receives the Outstanding Young Range Professional Award of the Society for Range Management. Congratulations, Lauren!
October 2017: Kurt Vaughn takes a position as Director of the Borderlands Restoration Leadership Institute.
September 2017: Marit Wilkerson takes a position as Planning Director, Northern Great Plains, with The Nature Conservancy.
August/September 2017: Annual meeting of the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) in Brazil. Truman presented: “Context-dependence of priority effects in the restoration of California grasslands”.
August 2017: Laura Morales takes a position as an Instructor for the School for Field Studies, Peru.
August 2017: Jen Balachowski’s paper, “Implications of plant functional traits and drought survival strategies for ecological restoration” appears online in the Journal of Applied Ecology.
August 2017: Kristina Wolf’s paper on the cascading effects of grassland restoration on rodents, snakes, and raptors appears online in the Journal of Applied Ecology.
August 2017: Ten current and recent lab members (and a mystery man) converge on Portland, Oregon for the Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America. Sitting: Kari Veblen, Lauren Porensky, Truman, Elizabeth Forbes. Standing: Kevin Welch, Chhaya Werner, Jen Balachowski, Grace Charles, Katie Stuble, Amy Wolf, Corinna Riginos, Han Olff.

2018 Young lab ESA

July 2017: Kelly Gravuer’s paper, “Nutrient and rainfall additions shift phylogenetically estimated traits of soil microbial communities” is published in Frontiers in Microbiology.
June 2017: The KLEE project (the Kenya Longterm Exclosure Experiment) exceeds 100 publications (70 from the exclosures themselves), making it the most productive field experiment ever carried on on the continent of Africa.
June 2017: Kristina Wolf shepherds a lab review on the role on restoration in responding to climate change, published in Grasslands.
June 2017: Kari Veblen gets tenure at Utah State University. Congratulations. Kari!
May 2017: Corinna Riginos takes a position as Conservation Scientist for The Nature Conservancy in Wyoming.
May 2017: Lab gets two papers published in Ecology, one first-authored by Ryan Sensenig on fire and ants in KLEE (Kenya) and one first-authored by Katie Stuble on priority effects, year effects, and site effects in PRYER (California).
May 2017: Duncan Kimuyu’s paper the effects of cattle, rainfall and elephants on wildlife habitat use appears in .
April 2017: Wilfred Odadi’s paper on post-fire competition between wildlife and cattle is chosen as an Editor’s Choice in the Journal of Ecology. Well done, Wilfred!
March 2017: Kristina Wolf takes a position as a restoration scientist at H.T. Harvey.
March 2017: Laura Morales is awarded her doctorate in Ecology. Congratulations, Laura!
January to August 2017: There is an invasion of hundreds of armed herders and over 100,000 cattle into Laikipia, Kenya.
January 2017: Paper on the effects of wildlife and cattle on savanna primary productivity, senior-authored by Grace Charles and Lauren Porensky, is published in Ecological Applications.
December 2016: Starry Sprenkle’s paper on agroforestry/restoration in Haiti is published in Ecological Restoration, and gets the cover photo!
December 2016: Duncan Kimuyu is awarded his Ph.D. from the University of Nairobi. Congratulations, Duncan!
November 2016: Lauren Porensky’s paper on edge effects and patch orientation appears in Landscape Ecology.
October 2016: Laura Morales is co-author on a Polylepis genetics paper published in Austral Ecology.
April-September 2016: the extended lab celebrates two engagements, two marriages, two babies, and two more on the way!

September 2016: Chhaya Werner’s first-authored paper on the long-term effects of priority planting in restoration is published in Ecological Applications.
September 2016: “Are cattle surrogate wildlife?”, summarizing 15 years of KLEE vegetation data, is published in Ecological Applications, and gets the cover photo!
August 2016: Kelly Gravuer is awarded her Ph.D. degree. Congratulations, Kelly!
August 2016: Kristina Wolf’s paper the relationship between livestock production and recreational use of public lands is accepted for publication in Rangeland Ecology and Management.
July 2016: Jennifer Balachowski’s paper on the physiological correlates of summer dormancy in grasses is published in Annals of Botany.
July 2016: Steve Fick’s paper on restoration on the Colorado Plateau is published in Ecosphere.
July 2016: Jen Balachowski and Kristina Wolf are awarded Shapiro Family Awards for the best doctoral dissertations at UC Davis in Plant Sciences and Agroecology, respectively. Well done, Kristina and Jen!
June 2015: Kristina Wolf’s paper exploring the use of flushing annuals as a restoration technique is published in Ecosphere.
May 2016: Steve Fick and Kristina Wolf earn their Ph.D.’s in Ecology. Congratulations, Kristina and Steve!
March 2016: Chhaya Werner is awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Way to go, Chhaya!
March 2016: Emily Zefferman accepts a Conservation Ecologist position with the Monterrey Resource Conservation District (RCD). Congratulations, Emily!
March 2016: Steve Fick accepts a Research Associate position with the Stockholm Environmental Institute, Sweden. Congratulations, Steve!
March 2016: Truman co-leads an 18-day graduate field course down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, and survives.
February 2016: “Leveraging nature’s backup plans” appears in Restoration Ecology.
January 2016: Mila Dunbar-Irwin’s paper comparing yellow pine forests in (burned) Baja and (fire-suppressed) California comes out in Forest Ecology and Management.
December 2015: Katie Stuble wraps up her post-doc in the Young lab to start an ISEECI post-doc, followed by a full-time position with the Holden Arboretum in Ohio.
December 2015: Jen Balachowski earns her Ph.D. in Ecology. Congratulations, Jen!
August 2015: First paper on the synergistic effects of fire and herbivory appears in the Journal of Animal Ecology.
June 2015: A lab-written paper on the low invasion of harsh sites (senior-authored by Emily Zefferman) appears in AoB PLANTS.
June 2015: Emily Zefferman is awarded a Shapiro Award for the best dissertation in Ecology at UC Davis. Congratulations, Emily!
June 2015: Lab paper on fire revealing cryptic plant diversity, first-authored by Derek Young, is published in Ecosphere.
Spring 2015: The Ecological Society of America announces their 2015-19 cohort of (nine) Early Career Fellows. One is lab alumna Corinna Riginos. Congratulations, Corinna! Three others are past or current KLEE researchers at Mpala (Hillary Young, Rob Pringle, and Brian Allan).

Lab News

June 2023: Chhaya Werner's PRYER paper, "Year effects drive beta diversity, but unevenly across community types", is accepted for publication in Ecology.

May 2023: Mary Ngugi Waithira passes her MSc examination at the University of Nairobi, based on dissertation work on KLEE controlled burns.

April 2023: Truman's note, "High mountain wanderings" is published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

January 2023: Harry Wells starts a postdoc at Princeton University, working with Rob Pringle and Dave Wilcove to explore patterns and ecological impacts of rewilding and the use of restoration as a tool to understand ecosystem processes.

January 2023: Harry Wells' KLEE and UHURU paper, "Wild herbivores enhance resistance to invasion by exotic cacti in an African savanna", is published in the Journal of Ecology, and gets the Cover.

December 2022: Truman joins the Board of Directors of the Greater Arkansas River Nature Association (GARNA).

October 2022: Truman visits collaborators and gives a talk at the Global Change and Sustainability Center at the University of Utah: "Deconstructing the conservation-development paradigm, and reconstructing it in an African savanna"

October 2022: Mary Waithira Ngugi's KLEE paper, "Fire and herbivory interactively suppress survival and growth of trees in an African semiarid savanna", appears in Fire.

August-September 2022: Truman makes an extended research trip visit the Kenya Long-term Exclosure Experiment (KLEE).

August 2022: Chhaya Werner is interviewed by Oregon Public Radio about ecosystem renewal after the removal of the Elwah River dams.

August 2022: Jen Balachowski takes a position as Sustainability Science and Communications Lead for the start-up NCX.

July 2022: Alex Palmerlee is awarded a Conservation Innovation Grant (CIG), from NRCS, for "Developing targeted land management practices for effective and cost-efficient oak restoration" (w/ collaborators Kurt Vaughn, Valerie Eviner, and Truman Young).

June 2022: Truman rafts the San Juan River with the UC Davis EcoGeo course, having in previous years joined them on the Grand Canyon (twice) and the Yampa-Green.

June 2022: Carmen Ebel's KLEE paper, "Herbivory and drought reduce the temporal stability of herbaceous cover by increasing synchrony in a semi-arid savanna" appears in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

April 2022: Truman becomes an affiliate of the Graduate Degree Program in Ecology (GDPE) at Colorado State University.

April 2022: Alex Palmerlee's paper, "Drill-seeding blue oak acorns: testing the (cost-)effectiveness of a new restoration technique across years and microsites" appears in Ecological Restoration.

March 2022: A second paper from the 2018 KLEE burns, "The effects of large mammalian herbivory, previous fire, and year of burn on fire behavior in an African savanna" appears in Ecosphere and gets the Cover photo.

March 2022: Duncan Kimuyu, Ryan Sensenig, and an army of helpers (including five NSF-supported REU undergraduates) completed 36 controlled burns in KLEE, the third set since 2013.

February 2022: The mega-authored paper led by Marta Sperandii, "LOTVS: a global collection of permanent vegetation plots" (including the KLEE data set) appears in the Journal of Vegetation Science.

February 2022: Another Harry Wells KLEE paper, "At high stocking rates, cattle do not functionally replace wild herbivores in shaping understory community composition", appears in Ecological Applications.

February 2022: : Harry Wells' KLEE paper, "Less is more: Lower cattle stocking rates enhance wild herbivore habitat use and cattle foraging efficiency" appears in in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

January 2022: "Altering native community assembly history influences the performance of an annual invader", by Manon Hess et al. appears in Basic and Applied Ecology.

January 2022: Harry Wells joins the KLEE research group as a post-doc.

December 2021: Chhaya Werner accepts an Assistant Professor position at Southern Oregon University. Congratulations, Chhaya!

November 2021: Mary Waithira Ngugi (University of Nairobi) begins her MSc research on post-fire survival and growth in acacias, supported by KLEE.

August-September 2021: After a long COVID-induced delay, Truman finally gets back to visit the KLEE project in Kenya (and visits Elise Buisson in Avignon).

Aug 2021: Russ Huddleston takes a position as an Ecologist (Wetlands Section) at US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

July 2021: "Large herbivore loss has complex effects on mosquito ecology and vector‐borne disease risk" by David Tchouassi, Baldwin Torto, Rosemary Sang, Corinna Riginos, and Vanessa Ezenwa, a fascinating paper on mosquitoes in KLEE, appears in Transboundary and Emerging Diseases.

June 2021: Another Harry Wells KLEE (and UHURU) paper, "Experimental evidence that effects of megaherbivores on mesoherbivore space use are influenced by species’ traits" is accepted for publication in Journal of Animal Ecology.

May 2021: Harry Wells' KLEE paper, "Cattle and large wild herbivores increase local diversity of smaller vertebrates, but less than additively", appears in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

April 2021: The KLEE paper, "Naïve plant communities and individuals may initially suffer in the face of reintroduced megafauna: an experimental exploration of rewilding from an African savanna rangeland". appears in PLOS One.

March 2021: Eric LaMalfa's KLEE paper (w/ Kari and Corinna), "Browsing wildlife and heavy grazing indirectly facilitate sapling recruitment in an East African savanna" is accepted for publication in Ecological Applications.

February 2021: Grace Charles' KLEE paper, "Termite mound cover and abundance respond to herbivore-mediated biotic changes in an African savanna", is accepted for publication in the Ecology & Evolution.

January 2021: Laura Morales accepts a post-doc at World Agroforestry-ICRAF (formerly the International Center for Research in Agro-forestry) in Lima Peru, emphasizing ecological resiliency.

December 2020: "Absentee owners and overlapping home ranges in a territorial species" (vervets at Mpala) is accepted for publication in Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology.

November 2020: Kelly Gravuer publishes "Invader-resident relatedness and soil management history shape patterns of invasion of compost microbial populations into agricultural soils" in Applied Soil Ecology.

October 2020: A paper from KLEE by Chhaya Werner et al., "Synergistic effects of herbivores and repeat fire on spatial heterogeneity of prescribed burns and their consequences for tree saplings", is accepted for publication in Ecology. Two Ecology papers in one year for Chhaya!

August 2020: A review led by Elise Buisson, "Key issues in north-western Mediterranean grassland restoration", is accepted for publication in Restoration Ecology.

July 2020: Truman (barely) survives his tenure as Chair of the Graduate Group in Ecology.

July 2020: A second mega-authored synthesis (using KLEE data) by Enrique Valencia et al., "Synchrony matters more than species richness in plant community stability at a global scale", is accepted for publication in PNAS.

June 2020: The mega-authored synthesis (using KLEE data) by Enrique Valencia et al., "Directional trends in species abundance over time can lead to a widespread overestimation of asynchrony", is accepted for publication in the Journal of Vegetation Science.

June 2020: Keita Decarlo and Kelly Caylor publish a new paper from KLEE, in Geoderma: "Effects of crack morphology on soil carbon flux dynamics in a dryland vertisol."

June 2020: Starry Sprenkle accepts a position as Restoration Science Director at Conservation International.

May 2020: The group paper, "Myth-busting tropical grassy biome restoration" appears online in Restoration Ecology.

April 2020: Chhaya's other great April achievement: Varisha Lupin Werner Latson.

April 2020: Chhaya Werner's review paper, "Year effects: inter-annual variation as a driver of community assembly dynamics", appears online in Ecology.

April 2020: Amid the COVID-19 muddle, our French colleagues return to France, nearly on schedule.

March 2020: Judith Sitters' KLEE paper, "Megaherbivores reverse negative effects of cattle on soil carbon and nutrient pools" appears in Nature Sustainability, with a nice commentary by Mark Ritchie, and additional coverage here (in Science), and here.

February 2020: Several lab alums converge on the annual meeting of the Society for Range Management in Denver: Kari Veblen, Lauren Porensky, Corinna Riginos, Steve Fick, and Truman. Lauren was a Plenary Speaker!

February 2020: Katie Stuble's latest PRYER publication, "Priority treatment leaves grassland restoration vulnerable to invasion" is published in Diversity.

January 2020: With support from the France-Berkeley Fund, Avignon Université, and UC Davis, Truman and Val Eviner begin hosting a visit from restoration ecologists Elise Buisson, Manon Hess, Aure Durbecq, Renaud Jaunatre, and Julie Braschi of Avignon Université (and allied universities).

December 2019: Truman Young and Mark Schwartz publish "The Decade of Restoration is an impetus to get it right" in Conservation Science and Practice.

November 2019: Chhaya Werner's paper, "Decreased snowpack and warmer temperatures reduce the negative effects of interspecific competitors on regenerating conifers" appears in Oecologia.

October 2019: "Thresholds are in the eye of the beholder: plants and wildlife respond differently to short‐term cattle corrals" by Kari Veblen and Lauren Porensky appears in Ecological Applications.

September 2019: At the International Meeting of of the Society for Ecological Restoration in Cape Town, South Africa, Truman co-leads a workshop on Priority Effects in Restoration, with Cara Nelson and Elise Buisson.

September 2019: Truman's review of Rewilding (Eds. Nathalie Pettorelli, Sarah M. Durant, and Johan T. Du Toit. Cambridge University Press) appears in the Quarterly Review of Biology.

September 2019: Eric LaMalfa and Kari Veblen's KLEE paper, "Tree resprout dynamics following fire depend on herbivory by wild ungulate herbivores", appears in the Journal of Ecology.

September 2019: Stuart Graham's paper, "Effects of land-use change on community diversity and composition are highly variable among functional groups", based in part on KLEE, is published in Ecological Applications.

August 2019: At the Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Louisville, Kentucky, Truman meets up with Collaborators Amy Wolf, Katie Stuble, and Lauren Hallett.

August 2019: Kevin Welch takes a position as an environmental scientist for the Climate and Energy Program at CAL FIRE.

July 2019: After a delay of several years, our article on Ecological Restoration came out in Encyclopaedia Britannica(!).

June 2019: Derek Young receives a Mistletoe Research Fellowship.

June 2019: Truman floats the Yampa-Green with a group of ecologists, hydrologists and geologists (and a resource economist) from UC Davis, (and gets tossed).

May 2019: Kurt Vaughn and Clare Ray welcome Odin into the world!

May 2019: Elizabeth Forbes's review (with KLEE co-authors), "Synthesizing the effects of large, wild herbivores on ecosystem function", appears in Functional Ecology.

April 2019: Truman visits Chhaya Werner and Jon Chase at iDiv in Leipzig, Germany.

April 2019: Lauren Porensky receives one of four 2019 Early Career Research Scientist Awards from ARS (Agricultural Research Service).

February 2019: Derek Young’s paper, "Post-fire forest regeneration shows limited climate tracking and potential for drought-induced type conversion", is published in Ecology.

February 2019: Grace Charles takes a position as a Research Scientist with the Surgo Foundation in Washington, D.C.

January 2019: Bode Kelly Veblen joins his sister Marea in Logan, Utah.

January 2019: Wilfred Odadi is awarded a two-year FLAIR fellowship from the Royal Society (London).

January 2019: Malcolm Norths' "Tamm review, Reforestation for resilience in dry western U.S. forests" appears in Forest Ecology and Management, with three ex-Young lab members as co-authors.

December 2018: All my chicks have fledged, and soar high above and far afield.

November 2018: Brad Bergstrom’s grand survey of Mpala rodents (including KLEE) appears in Ecosphere: “Searching for cover: soil enrichment and herbivore exclusion, not fire, enhance African savanna small-mammal abundance”.

November 2018: Jen Balachowski accepts a position at the US African Development Foundation (as part of her Presidential Management Fellowship).

November 2018: Chhaya Werner is awarded her doctorate. Congratulations, Chhaya!

November 2018: Nature Ecology and Evolution published Sally Koerner’s monster meta-analysis on the effects of herbivores on plant communities, including data from KLEE (“Resolving variation in herbivore effects on plant biodiversity– dominance as a global mechanism”).

November 2018: The multi-lab synthesis, “Conservation and management lessons from large-mammal manipulations in East Africa – KLEE, UHURU, and GLADE” appears in The Year in Conservation and Ecology (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences).

October 2018: Kelly Gravuer gets married (to Jeff Le), and accepts a position as an AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow with the EPA in Washington, D.C.

January **2023: Harry Wells' KLEE and UHURU paper, "Wild herbivores enhance resistance to invasion by exotic cacti in an African savanna", is published in the Journal of Ecology, and gets the Cover.**

October 2022: **Mary Waithira Ngugi's KLEE paper, "Fire and herbivory interactively suppress survival and growth of trees in an African semiarid savanna", appears in Fire.**

July 2021: "Large herbivore loss has complex effects on mosquito ecology and vector‐borne disease risk " by David Tchouassi, Baldwin Torto, Rosemary Sang, Corinna Riginos, and Vanessa Ezenwa, a fascinating paper on mosquitoes in KLEE, appears in Transboundary and Emerging Diseases.