Lab News
May 2026
Congratulations to Arjun Potter and the entire team for their paper that was just published in the Journal of Ecology (manuscript link below). The paper describes how acacias use up to two different strategies to survive fire in their first year: they either resist topkill with thickened stems and/or regrow from below-ground stems. The paper is the first to report results from the multi-factor common garden experiment conducted at Nelson Mandela African Institution for Science and Technology in Arusha Tanzania. The experiment was a full-factorial common garden experiment to measure the separate and combined impacts of fire, drought, grass competition, and herbivory on mortality rates of 3- to 6-month-old ‘Acacia’ seedlings (sensu lato) in the genera Vachellia and Senegalia. Great work Arjun - stay tuned because there is more to come.
February 2026
Congratulations to Basil Senso and team for their new paper titled “Environmental drivers of parasitic nematode infection in wild ungulates in the Serengeti National Park” published in the International Journal for Parasitology. These important results highlight how parasite life cycles interact with environmental variables operating at different temporal scales. The work demonstrates that seasonal infection patterns can emerge from processes acting at times distinct from parasite development and transmission.
January 2026
Congratulations to Andrew MacDougall and the entire team that assembled this important and incredibly important research article. The regions of earth previously classified as the “grassy biome” have always been sketchy - but this paper shows us just how bad it has been! Moreover, by correcting planetary estimates, this paper adjusts grassland coverage to 22.8% of the terrestrial land cover (30.1 million km^2) and increases soil carbon stocks to 155.02 Pg (0–30 cm depth). This paper offers a major advancement in our capacity to map biomes and predict future changes to the biosphere.
November 2025
After seven years of collaboration (!) we have finally published our paper about The African Database of Savanna Protected Areas in the journal Diversity and Distributions. Thanks to all the coauthors for their patience and perseverance.
August 2025
Welcome to new MSc student Brian Kaelo who is studying cattle grazer interactions in the Maasai Mara in Kenya
Congratulations to Ellen on her paper about differential gene reactions in acacias published in The Plant Journal
February 2025
We published a paper in Science that addresses the decades long conundrum about grazing succession in the great Serengeti migration.
Here is a companion article to our grazing succession paper (written for the general public) published in The Conversation.