Author Archives: karoeder

The final leg of the NEON ants 2017 project—an NSF funded project— has come and gone. We visited two beautiful locations: Organ Pipe National Monument and Appleton-Whittell Research Ranch. Both of these sites were in Arizona, a state that harbors some of the greatest ant diversity in North America. Now that the fieldwork is done,Continue reading “NEON Ants 2017: Site 9 and 10 – Organ Pipe National Monument and Appleton-Whittell Research Ranch, Arizona”

Every once in a while you get the feeling of being in a magical place. A place few have been before, and one that few will probably visit in the future. While the Boyd Deep Canyon Desert Research Center is visited by students of the University of California system for field trips and field work,Continue reading “NEON Ants 2017: Site 8 – Boyd Deep Canyon Desert Research Center, California”

The NEON ants crew is back at it after a short hiatus for the Ecological Society of America Annual meeting. This time we are headed to the lovely south western United States. Our first stop is right on the border of Southern California and Mexico around the town of El Centro. A funny story. HavingContinue reading “NEON Ants 2017: Site 7 – El Centro, California”

The National Ecological Observatory Network (or NEON for short) just released a blog post about some of the work that we have been doing over the past two years. In it, they describe what we are up to (like the above image of how we sample 1-m² plots for ants) and some things still toContinue reading “Neon Blog Post: “Researchers leverage NEON field sites to find out what ants can tell us about changing climates””

I haven been quite busy catching up on writing and reviewing manuscripts so this update will more or less be just a slide show of the last 2 sites that we visited before coming home to Oklahoma. Sites 5 and 6 of the Neon Ants 2017 project visited the beautiful Myles Standish State Forest inContinue reading “Neon Ants 2017-Part 3: Myles Standish State Forest, Massachusetts and Cedar Creek LTER, Minnesota”

Sites 3 and 4 of the Neon Ants 2017 project visited two wonderful LTER sites on the east coast of the USA: Virginia Coast Reserve LTER, Virginia and the Harvard Forest LTER, Massachusetts. The LTER (Long Term Ecological Research: https://lternet.edu/) program covers 25 different ecosystems from Alaska to the Caribbean including deserts, estuaries, lakes, oceans,Continue reading “Neon Ants 2017-Part 2: Virginia Coast Reserve LTER, Virginia and Harvard Forest LTER, Massachusetts”

The 2017 leg of the Neon Ants project is officially underway! So far we have visited two sites: (1) Mark Twain National Forest, Missouri and (2) Bankhead National Forest, Alabama. Both forests were quite nice, albeit the humidity is always surprising in the south. Mark Twain National Forest Bankhead National Forest   Next post IContinue reading “Neon Ants 2017-Part 1: Mark Twain National Forest, Missouri and Bankhead National Forest, Alabama”

Summer is upon us and I am really exciting about the research that I will be doing in just a few short weeks. One of my goals, really wishes, when I was applying for graduate school was to try and understand where and why ant species are distributed across different habitats. Last year, I gotContinue reading “Summer Research 2017!”