Adriana Suarez-Gonzalez, PhD Candidate, Botany, UBC
New Year, New Ideas and New Technologies
It is funny how I think taking a vacation will recharge my battery pack, but a break usually leaves me completely empty. It actually takes me a couple of weeks of work to recharge. For the holidays I went to Colombia, so I have been in recharging mode for the last couple of weeks. I […]
Adaptation, genes and poplar trees
Why do I care about genes, adaptation and poplar trees? What makes me excited about this research topic? Read on my friend and find out (and maybe you will care too 🙂 ). My species of interest is black cottonwood (Populus trichocarpa), an ecologically and economically important forest tree from North America, and the first […]
The Biodiversity of Beer
Beer is, perhaps, the oldest fermented beverage known to humankind; and after water and tea, it is the third most popular beverage in the world. These days beer is made from a few key ingredients: water, barley, yeast, and hops. Yet it wasn’t always so. In its thousands of years of history, beer has been […]
A tiny speck of an island packed with biodiversity!
A few weeks ago, I took a trip to Lady Elliot Island at the extreme southern end of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) about 80 km off the Queensland, Australia, coast. Lady Elliot Island is a coral “cay island”; a small, low elevation, sand island on top of a coral reef. A few weeks ago, […]
Putting together the biodiversity puzzle
I became an ecologist for the love of being out in leafy forests and wide mountain vistas. I was never thrilled by the idea of staring into a microscope for hours on end. But it’s amazing what a scientist will do to fill in just one little piece of the biodiversity puzzle. Oak savannahs […]
A trip to the home of the “Queensland lungfish”
Even though all living lungfishes now exist only on continents in the Southern Hemisphere, they used to be found (millions of years ago) on all continents and proliferated during the Devonian Period or the so-called “Age of Fishes” (~400 million years ago). While returning from a dive venture to the southern Great Barrier Reef (GBR) […]
Seeing the Forest for the Trees
While many of us spend a lot of time walking around campus on our way to class, work or otherwise, how many of us truly stop and appreciate the rich natural history which populates our campus?
Happy Holidays from the Beaty Biodiversity Museum!
As we enter this winter holiday season, it is a good time to reflect on the role of biodiversity in our lives, and specifically the role that biodiversity plays in the holiday traditions we all cherish
Pecha Kucha
Last week I gave a talk at PechaKucha Night Vancouver, a public mini-symposium of fast-paced talks which happens every few months. The talks are usually about art, design, and social projects, in which case why was I, a biologist, talking there? Well, watch to find out.
The Story of String
String, rope, twine, cordage – what’s the big deal? String is one of the most important, yet under-acknowledged, of all of human technology – and for the vast majority of our history, it was made from plant and animal fibres.