Over the past month, I’ve had the opportunity to help out with a variety of my colleagues’ projects at work. In this article, I highlight two of these projects. These reflections are written on my personal time, are not part…
Welcome back! This is my fourth article in a mini-series exploring biodiversity, using the plant community in my home garden as an example. In the first article, I presented the results of a botanical inventory of the garden, using cover…
This is the third in a series of articles looking at plant diversity in my small, home garden. The first one presented the results of a botanical inventory I did about a month ago, which included total and proportional cover…
A couple updates This article is a continuation of my last article, in which I presented the results of a botanical inventory of my home garden with the goal of analyzing biological diversity. I have two updates of this project.…
Why inventory the plants in my garden? This week I decided to do a botanical inventory of my small home garden. As I understand, knowing what plant species are present and in what amounts is an important metric to track…
Growing kalo for the first time A few weeks ago, a colleague gifted me with a kalo (taro) plant, my first kalo plant ever. The timing of this was perfect, as I had recently been thinking about growing kalo in…
The past couple of weeks I’ve been learning about biocultural restoration in Hawai’i, and I have some article ideas I’ve been stewing on. But in the meantime, I wanted to write about a different topic that I’ve been sitting on…
This week I read a paper that quickly felt unusual among the scientific publications I’ve encountered in my career. The abstract was in a familiar format, but then in the introduction, the authors–using a narrative style–invite the reader into their…
This week I read the paper Kōkua aku, Kōkua mai: An Indigenous Consensus-driven and Place-based Approach to Community Led Dryland Restoration and Stewardship. I chose this paper to learn more about biocultural restoration in general and about a specific restoration…
I ended my last article with a brief note about species belonging. I now explore that topic in more depth here. I do this using a framework presented in the 2025 paper by Rayne and colleagues, “Renegotiating Species Belonging in…