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Welcome to the UNC Plant Ecology Lab (PEL)! PEL focuses on a study of the composition and dynamics of vegetation throughout North Carolina, the Southeastern United States, and the world.
Feel free to contact us with any questions. More news can be found on specific members‘ personal webpages as well.
News from the Lab:
2018
Robert Peet Attended the Annual Symposium of the International Association for Vegetation Science in Bozeman Montana, where he presented the Plenary Lecture. His career and accomplishments were again recognized, with Tom (T’Dawg) Wentworth repeating his Peet rap (https://www.facebook.com/groups/iavs.org/permalink/10156542189954812/).
Robert Peet formally retired July 1 following 43 years as a UNC professor! His role has switched to that of Research Professor and he plans to actively continue publication of his long list of rearch projects. His students and colleagues honored him with a celebration at the North Carolina Botanical Garden
Chris Payne successfully defended his PhD dissertation, entitled “Long-term temporal dynamics of the Duke Forest.” In August Chris started as Assistant Professor of Biology at Malone University in Canton, OH!
Chris Payne Received the Eugene P. Odum Award (sponsored by the SE Chapter of the Ecological Society of America) for best oral presentation on ecological research at the Association of Southeastern Biologists 79th Annual Meeting in Myrtle Beach, SC.
Sam Tessel and Chris Payne attended the 79th annual meeting of the Association of Southeastern Biologists in Myrtle Beach, SC.
2017
Sam Tessel graduated with her PhD! She defended her thesis, “Dispersal effects on species distribution and diversity across multiple scales in the southern Appalachian mixed mesophytic flora” in November, 2017.
Bianca Lopez graduated with her PhD! Bianca is now a post-doctoral fellow at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC)!
Michael Lee, who has served as database manager along with enumerable other essential roles for the Plant Ecology Lab for 16+ years departed the lab in February to start a job at NatureServe in Durham, NC!
Fall 2016
Alissa Brown participated as a finalist in UNC’s Three Minute Thesis Competition.
Alissa Brown published the results of her Master’s thesis through PloS ONE, accessible here!
Robert Peet participated in the sPlot working group meeting in Leipzig Germany.
Summer 2016
Alissa Brown, Bianca Lopez, Robert Peet and Alan Weakley attended the 101st annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Fort Lauderale, FL. Alissa presented a poster and Bianca & Robert gave oral presentations.
Robert Peet was awarded Honorary Membership in the International Association for Vegetation Science. He is the first person from the Americas to receive this honor!
Robert Peet participated in the 59th annual symposium (and associated excursions) of the the International Association for Vegetation Science in Pirenópolis, Brazil.
Spring 2016
Peter Wilfahrt graduated with his PhD! Peter is now a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany!
Dennis Tarasi graduated with his PhD! Dennis is now an assistant professor of ecology at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College, Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, IN!
Alissa Brown, Chris Payne, Dennis Tarasi, Derick Poindexter and Alan Weakley attended the 77th annual meeting of the Association of Southeastern Biologists in Concord, North Carolina. Alissa won the Southeastern Chapter of the Ecological Society of America’s Quarterman-Keever Award for the best student poster presentation in ecology and the Southeastern Section of the Botanical Society of America’s Outstanding Student Poster Presentation Award for a poster in plant science.
Summer 2015
Bob Peet, Michael Lee, Dennis Tarasi, Chris Payne, Bianca Lopez and Peter Wilfahrt attended the 100th Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Baltimore, Maryland.
Chris Payne was awarded the J.T. Callahan Student Travel Award from the Ecological Society of America Long-term Studies Section
Bob Peet and Michael Lee attended the International Association of Vegetation Science conference in Brno, The Czech Republic.
Alan Weakley and Michael Lee released their new iPhone app for the flora of the Southeast, Flora Quest. FloraQuest (http://www.floraquest.com) allows users to identify and record naturally occurring plants in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic US!
Michael Lee presented an overview of VegBank at the IAVS Symposium in Brno, Czech Republic.
Chris Payne received a 2015 STEM scholarship from the Great Lakes National Scholarship Program.
Chris Payne participated as a “Material, Food, & Waste” working group member for the UNC Strategic Sustainability Plan (Summer-Fall 2015)
Spring 2015
Bob Peet, Samantha Tessel and Chris Payne participated in the 28th annual Pulse of the Carolina Vegetation Survey, this year focused on Heritage preserves of the South Carolina inner Coastal Plain.
Bob Peet, Chris Payne, Elizabeth Scheerer and Margot Walston participated in the Lab Group canoe excursion to the interior of the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, and also visited Beidler Memorial Forest and the Congaree National Park along the way.
Bob Peet, Chris Payne, Dennis Tarasi, Chris Hakkenberg, John Powers, Kevan Schoonover, Bianca Lopez, Elizabeth Scherrer, Peter Wilfahrt and Kriti Sharma participated in a Lab Group excursion south to Savannah River Bluffs Preserve SC, Steven’s Creek Preserve SC, Burks Mountain GA, Heggies Rock TNC Preserve GA, Forty Acre Rock Preserve SC, and Uwharrie National Forest NC.
Chris Payne, Dennis Tarasi, & Peter Wilfahrt presented their research at the 76th annual meeting of the Association of Southeastern Biologists, April 1-4 in Chattanooga, TN.
Chris Payne was elected Webmaster for the Southeast Chapter of ESA and developed their new website.
Chris Payne and Bianca Lopez were awarded Dissertation Completion Fellowships from the UNC Graduate School!
Bianca Lopez won the Rapid Research Competition at the Southeastern Ecology and Evolution Conference in Athens, GA.
Chris Payne and Dennis Tarasi were selected to participate in the Future Faculty Fellowship Program through the UNC Center for Faculty Excellence during Fall 2015.
Fall 2014
Bob Peet participated in the sPlot workshop Plain trait-environment relationships across the world’s biomes in Leipzig, Germany.
Alan Weakley and Bob Peet participated in a workshop on Understanding Taxon Ranges in Space and Time: Tackling the Taxon Concept Problem at the University of California, Berkeley.
Alan Weakley and Bob Peet participated in a meeting of the ESA Panel on Vegetation Classification in Baltimore, MD.
Bob Peet attended the annual meeting of the Longleaf Alliance in Mobile, AL
Chris Payne presented two invited talks at Saint Vincent College about his research and preparing undergraduates for research, internships, and graduate school.
August 2014
Bob Peet and Michael Lee attended the International Association of Vegetation Science conference in Perth, Australia.
Chris Payne received a 2014 STEM scholarship from the Great Lakes National Scholarship Program.
Spring 2014
Kyle Palmquist has been hired as a postdoctoral research scientist at the University of Wyoming! Best of luck in your future endeavors!
Bianca Lopez was awarded a Summer Research Grant from the UNC Center for the Study of the American South.
Chris Payne, Dennis Tarasi, Peter Wilfahrt, Kyle Palmquist, and Michael Lee presented research at the 75th annual meeting of the Association of Southeastern Biologists April 2-5, in Spartanburg, SC
Kyle Palmquist, Peter Wilfahrt and Bianca Lopez co-authored a paper, entitled “Using trait and phylogenetic diversity to evaluate the generality of the stress-dominance hypothesis in eastern North American tree communities,” which has been accepted for publication in the the journal Ecography.
Karl Fetter successfully defended his Master’s thesis, entitled “Extinction, migration, speciation – a post-glacial history of the population structure, phylogeography, and biodiversity of Liriodendron tulipifera L. (Magnoliaceae).” Congratulations Karl!
Fall 2013
The Flora of Virginia, co-authored by Alan Weakley, has received the Thomas Jefferson Conservation Award, from the Virginia Museum of Natural History, to be awarded March 20, 2014.
Jacqueline White successfully defended her PhD dissertation, entitled “The impact of the altered floodplain hydrology of the lower Roanoke River on tree regeneration and floodplain forest composition.” Congratulations Jackie!
Kyle Palmquist successfully defended her PhD dissertation, entitled “Community Assembly and Vegetation Patterns Across Space and Time in the Longleaf Pine Ecosystem.” Congratulations Kyle!
Chris Payne gave an invited presentation on his long-term forest research at the Duke forest Annual Research Tour.
Summer 2013
Peter White and Julie Tuttle published an essay on sustainability as a framework for conservation ethics in the journal Conservation Biology.
Dave Roberts and Michael Lee presented a data aggregation and harmonization workshop at the ESA Meeting in Minneapolis, MN. Michael showed how three datasets can be merged and standardized using Excel, while Dave walked participants through how that is accomplished using R.
Bianca Lopez, Peter Wilfahrt, Dennis Tarasi, Kyle Palmquist, Bob Peet, and Michael Lee attended and presented research at the 98th annual ESA meeting in Minneapolis, MN.
Kyle Palmquist presented research at the 2013 Botany conference in New Orleans, LA.
Spring 2013
Thomas Lehman and Michael Lee published North Carolina State Parks, which was featured in The Chapel Hill News
Michael Lee presented VegBank as a candidate for hosting the vegetation plots being assembled from Greenland, Russia, Canada, Alaska, and Svalbard for the to the Arctic Vegetation Survey at the Arctic Science Summit Week.
Kyle Palmquist won the Eugene P. Odum Award ($500) for the best student paper in Ecology presented at the annual meeting of the Association of Southeastern Biologists.
Karl Fetter, Kyle Palmquist, Alexandra Permar, Derick Poindexter, Dennis Tarasi, Sam Tessel, Alan Weakley and Peter Wilfahrt presented their research findings at the 2013 Meeting of the Association of Southeastern Biologists, April 9-12 in Charleston, West Virginia.
Kyle Palmquist received a $1000 Tom and Bruce Shinn Grant from the NC Native Plant Society to fund summer field work in the Green Swamp. More info here: http://www.ncwildflower.org/scholarships/shinn.htm
The Mobile Flora App proposal from Alan Weakley, Michael Lee, and Carol Ann McCormick won the Carolina Apps contest. The Innovate@Carolina team will be working with them over the next months to create an app for a phone or tablet near you that will make the Weakley Flora more readily accessible and more widely available.
January 8-11: UNC and PEL hosted at the NC Botanical Garden the annual meeting the Ecological Society of America Panel on Vegetation Classification.
Fall 2012
The new ~1554 page, 7 pound, 3″ thick Flora of Virginia by Alan Weakley, Chris Ludwig and Johnny Townsend was officially released. Order your copy at http://www.brit.org/brit-press/books/virginia.
November 27: Alan Weakley and Derick Poindexter have identified and named and new species of endemic piedmont wildflower, Marshallia legrandii. Their results were published in the journal Phytoneuron.
November 26-30: Robert Peet co-organized and attended the BIEN working group meeting at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, CA. For details, see http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/featured/enquist.
November 7, 2012. Robert Peet presented a lecture on the Carolina Vegetation Survey to the 2012 annual meeting of the North Carolina Friends of Plant Conservation. For details, see Carolina Vegetation Survey — 25+ years: 1988-2012+.
CVS received a grant from USDA-NRCS for $50,000 to help develop Ecological Site Descriptions for the Carolina Piedmont.
Michael Lee presented a lecture on the CVS Restoration Target Tool to the NCSU Streams Restoration Conference, October 17, in Wilmington, NC. For details, see http://cvs.bio.unc.edu/presentations/2012-10-StreamsConference-Lee-VegPredictionTool_v1.3.pptx.
Bianca Lopez presented a poster titled “Effects of Increased Temperature and Drought on Urban Riparian Plant Communities” at the Student Conference on Conservation Science, October 10, in New York City.
CVS received a subcontract for $33,054 as part of a contract between USDA and the ESA. CVS will develop proposals for changes in the portion of the NVC (National Vegetation Classification) pertaining to longleaf pine communities to be used as a test case for the development of the NVC peer-review process.
Chris Payne received a scholarship from the Great Lakes National Scholarship Program.
August 2012
Robert Peet was named one of the initial 121 Fellows of the Ecological Society of America. “ESA designates as Fellows of the Society certain members who have made outstanding contributions to a wide range of fields served by ESA. Such contributions include, but are not restricted to, those that advance or apply ecological knowledge in academics, government, non-profit organizations and the broader society.”
Kyle Palmquist presented a paper in the special symposium on “Frontiers in measuring and protecting long-lived vegetation dynamics” at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America. The paper was co-authored by Robert Peet, Jackie White and Kimberly Israel and was titled “Long-term vegetation change in contrasting North Carolina ecosystems.”
Peter Wilfahrt presented a paper on “Inference of ecological properties structuring tree communities in eastern North American using functional and phylogenetic diversity at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America. The paper was co-authored by Jessica Coyle, Kyle Palmquist, Bianca Lopez, F. W. Halliday, Katie Becraft, Clare Fieseler, Chris Hakkenberg, Chris Payne, Kayla Peck, Dennis Tarasi, Christine Urbanowicz, Charles Mitchell, Robert K. Peet and Allen H. Hurlbert.
Robert Peet was co-author on a poster in the organized poster section on “Ecologists doing history: notes from the field” held at the annual meeting of the Ecolgoical Society of America. The poster tited “A short history of vegetation classification and its relevance today” was also authored by Scott B. Franklin and David W. Roberts.
Bianca Lopez gave a presentation at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America, titled “A novel conceptual framework for using functional and phylogenetic diversity to identify community assembly processes along environmental gradients”.