Year: 2013

At the beginning of this month we had our professional development weekend (also known as Lab therapy) with the Thaler and the Agrawal lab. We all came back therapized and refreshed!

Mary Centrella joins our lab coming from the University of Wyoming. She is interested in the effects of competition, pesticides and landscape diversity on bees and will be jointly advised by Brian Danforth and me!

Welcome Mary!

We just received funding for our project: “Increasing potato yield through genetic and biochemical analysis of compensatory growth responses during tuber moth infestation” from the USDA!

We received funding from NIFA-Multistate to study

1) trade-offs between CPB and late blight resistance in different potato varieties.

2) plant tolerance to CPB damage and its potential use in agriculture.

This data will allow us to enhance a current late blight Decision Support System with information on CPB-potato variety interactions. We will be able to identify the varietal needs in the NE US, as well as forecasting the timing for fungicide and insecticide applications in potato fields.

Ricardo Perez just arrived from Colombia to join us as the first official grad student in the lab! He is interested in which metrics of diversity are the best to predict biological control services by natural insect communities.

Welcome Ricardo!

A greenhouse full of strawberries with fruits starting to develop…a good sign that the pollinators in our 15 different farms did a great job! In this experiment we are investigating how landscape complexity, apple bloom and the local environment (in-field vs forest edge) affect pollination services in commercial and wild strawberries. This is a collaborative effort and Heather Connelly and EJ Blitzer are key players in this great experiment.

Thanks to all the undergrads and techs that are helping us to get this project working!