Tag: University of Vermont

A keynote address by Emmy Award-winning journalist John Quiñones, co-anchor of ABC’s “Primetime,” kicks off an especially relevant Blackboard Jungle 11 Symposium on Thursday, March 22 at 4 p.m. in the Dudley H. Davis Center.

The focus of this year’s symposium, “The University: A Sanctuary or an Arena? Fostering Inclusive and Difficult Conversations,” coincides with protests and other forms of activism on college campuses across the country focused on racial equality, diversity and justice.

A full slate of related workshops designed to support UVM faculty and staff interested in gaining skills, knowledge and a deeper understanding of diversity to support excellence in teaching, service and research is scheduled for March 23. Interested members of the UVM community can register online for the symposium, sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Human Resources, Diversity and Multicultural Affairs.

“It is important to foster environments that are intellectually challenging but also respectful, safe and rewarding for all students, staff and faculty,” said Wanda-Heading-Grant, Vice President for Human Resources, Diversity and Multicultural Affairs. “How can we talk across divides and bring about a respectful and open exchange of ideas, perspectives and beliefs? How can we honor identities and insist on freedom of expression? Can the university campus offer a model of productive discourse in a divided society? Inside and outside classrooms, these are among the central problems faced by the twenty-first century university and beyond.”

Quiñones, a 30-year veteran of ABC News, anchors the “Primetime” series “What Would You Do?” and has served as a correspondent for “20/20.” Having grown up in a poor family of migrant workers, Quiñones is expected to share his journey to becoming ABC’s first Latino correspondent and a seven-time Emmy Award-winning journalist. His keynote presentation, titled “What Should You Do? Be an Active Bystander” is free and open to the public.

OiYan Poon, assistant professor of Higher Education Leadership in the School of Education at Colorado State University, will give the Dean’s Breakfast Keynote address, titled “Asian Americans between Black and White: Racial Justice or Just Us” on March 23 at 8 a.m. in the Silver Maple Ballroom. She is co-editor of a forthcoming edited volume from Stylus Publishing titled “Difficult Subjects: Insights and Strategies for Teaching about Race, Sexuality and Gender.”

Jelani Cobb, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, will give the Luncheon Keynote address at noon, titled “The Half-Life of Freedom: Race and Justice in America Today.” An expert contributor on MSNBC, NPR and CNN, Cobb has authored two books, including “The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama & the Paradox of Progress (Bloomsbury, 2010).” He will host a conversation later that afternoon at 2 p.m., titled “Journalism, Fake News, Politics, and Race.”

A series of symposium workshops will be offered after each keynote address designed to create open spaces where all members of the campus community can participate in authentic dialogue, reflection and learning to promote inclusiveness for all individuals. A number of UVM faculty will be running the workshops along with other top academics and practitioners from across the country.

Source: UVM News

Wanda Heading-Grant, vice president for Human Resources, Diversity and Multicultural Affairs at the University of Vermont, has received an Inclusive Excellence Award in the Individual Leadership category from the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education (NADOHE), one of only two awards the organization grants annually.

NADOHE recognized Heading-Grant at its annual conference recently in Washington, D.C.

The Individual Leadership Award is presented to a NADOHE member for outstanding contributions to research, administration, practice, advocacy and/or policy, and whose work informs and advances the understanding of diversity and inclusive excellence in higher education.

“We are very proud of Wanda,” said UVM President Tom Sullivan. “She is a truly visionary leader who, for 28 years at UVM, has developed and implemented a wide variety of innovative strategies and programs on diversity and inclusion that have engaged and united both UVM and our surrounding communities.”

“The intent of NADOHE’s Inclusive Excellence Awards is to recognize and promote innovative strategies and tactics designed to achieve inclusive excellence in higher education,” said NADOHE president, Archie W. Ervin. “We are delighted to recognize this year’s Inclusive Excellence Award recipients and their institutions for their stellar accomplishments with moving the needle toward inclusive excellence practices within American higher education.”

“Dr. Heading-Grant’s contributions as a change agent in the advancement of diversity and inclusive excellence in higher education are unparalleled,” wrote one of her nominators. “She has a universal ability to connect people, irrespective of issue, audience or venue, and this skill has enabled her to effectively transform the State of Vermont’s principal, and predominantly white, flagship institution.”

In her three decades of service to the University of Vermont, Heading-Grant has served in a broad range of academic and administrative roles including executive director, associate dean, associate provost, chief diversity officer and vice president. Her professional experience and volunteer service on the boards of numerous non-profit organizations and civil rights advisory committees have earned her a reputation as a cultural architect able to build and sustain real and lasting change.

Examples of her leadership include the relocation of the Mosaic Center for Students of Color from a remote part of the campus to a centrally located and larger space; the establishment of UVM’s first Interfaith Center offering space, programs for reflection, worship, and learning; increasing the university’s staff performance review process participation from 40 percent in 2015 to over 90 percent in 2017; the development of the UVM’s Women’s Summit; and the launch of the Blackboard Jungle Symposium, an annual professional development event designed to support UVM faculty, staff, and all others seeking to develop skills, knowledge, and a deeper understanding of diversity that supports excellence in learning, teaching, service and research.

Source: UVM News

The University of Vermont’s Sustainable Innovation MBA in the Grossman School of Business continues to gain international recognition by earning top-tier status in CEO Magazine’s 2018 Global MBA rankings. 

The Tier I ranking by the London-based business publication places UVM’s Sustainable Innovation MBA among the top 116 programs worldwide. It was also listed among the top 71 Top Tier programs in North America, with both rankings focusing on programs that combine exceptional quality with great return on investment.

“This is an important ranking for us because most other rankings are for MBA programs that specialize in sustainability/green business and this is a global ranking of the top MBA programs regardless of area of specialization,” said Sanjay Sharma, dean of the Grossman School of Business.

The 2018 rankings were based on 11 weighted criteria using data provided by more than 270 business schools from across North America, Europe, New Zealand, Australia and the BRICS. Quality of faculty was given the most weight (34.95 percent), followed by international diversity, class size, accreditation, faculty-student ratio, price, international exposure, work experience, professional development, gender parity and delivery methods.

“The Tier One status of the University of Vermont’s AACSB-accredited Sustainable Innovation MBA program is well deserved,” said Alexander Skinner, group editor-in-chief of CEO Magazine. “Individuals enrolling in the Grossman School of Business’s one-year MBA will benefit from small classes with other experienced professionals, great access to highly-qualified faculty, and opportunities for international travel via the program’s summer practicum project. Bringing together students and industry leaders, the program equips graduates with the knowledge, skills and experience required to directly impact positive, sustainable change, post-graduation.” 

The third consecutive Tier I ranking by CEO Magazine comes on the heels of being named the No. 1 “Best Green MBA” program in the U.S. by The Princeton Review. Corporate Knights also included the program in its top 10 “Better World MBA Ranking.”

Source: UVM News

Perhaps you missed the news that the price of hummus has spiked in Great Britain. The cause, as the New York Times reported on February 8: drought in India, resulting in a poor harvest of chickpeas. Far beyond making dips for pita bread, chickpeas are a legume of life-and-death importance—especially in India, Pakistan, and Ethiopia where 1 in 5 of the world’s people depend on them as their primary source of protein.

As global climate change continues, scientists expect more droughts, heat stress and insect pests—creating need for new varieties of agricultural plants with diverse qualities that will let them cope and adapt to quickly changing conditions. Where could those novel traits come from?

“The wild relatives of crop plants are the most promising reserves of genetic diversity,” says Eric Bishop von Wettberg, a plant biologist at the University of Vermont. He led a new research effort that took a deep look at the ecology and genetics of chickpea plants. The scientists discovered an extreme lack of genetic diversity and other threats to the future adaptability of domestic chickpeas. But they also collected wild relatives of chickpeas in southeastern Turkey that hold “great promise,” von Wettberg says, as a source of new genes for traits like drought-resistance, resistance to pod-boring beetles, and heat tolerance.

The team’s results were published February 13 in the journal Nature Communications—and have been receiving international media attention, including from Newsweek and Reuters.

Hunting the wild chickpea

Along with wheat, barley, peas, and other important crops, chickpea—Cicer arietinum—was probably domesticated in Mesopotamia, within the “Fertile Crescent,” about 10,000 years ago. Its closest wild relative, Cicer reticulatum, is now only found in a few provinces of southeastern Anatolia in modern-day Turkey. In 2013, von Wettberg, and colleagues from Turkey and other countries, spent two months surveying parts of Turkey and Kurdistan, near the border of Syria, searching for the two wild plant species most closely related to domestic chickpeas. “The way we found a lot of these populations was by driving around and asking shepherds on the side of the road, ‘yabani nohut?’ which means ‘wild chickpea,” von Wettberg says, “then they would take us out in the fields and show us the plants.”

At 21 sites, they collected seeds from 371 plants and collected DNA from 839. With this material and other research, they were able to decipher the history of the wild populations of chickpea relatives, estimate how the environment has impacted the genetics of chickpeas, and make links between the wild plants and the domestic ones. They discovered an extreme genetic bottleneck during the plant’s domestication history and report that more than 93% of the genetic variation in the wild plants is missing from modern chickpea breeding programs. This lack of diversity threatens the potential of commercial chickpea stock as the conditions in which farmers attempt to grow it—hotter, with a changing palette of pests, diseases, and weather patterns—become less and less like the conditions in which it was originally domesticated.

Controlling genes

“Despite their potential value in meeting the challenges of modern agriculture, few systematic, range-wide collections of wild relatives exist for any crop species,” the team of scientists write, “and even the available wild genetic resources are widely under-utilized for crop improvement.” As part of the new study, the scientists explored a large part of the geographic range of the two chickpea relatives, “from the bottom of the mountains to the top,” von Wettberg say—seeking to capture the diversity that differing micro-habitats, soil types, and elevations had created in various strains of the species. Then they did extensive crossbreeding of these wild plants with domestic ones. The resulting backcrossed plants and information about their genomes, “shows a way forward for improving chickpeas and many other crops too,” says von Wettberg, a professor in UVM’s Department of Plant and Soil Science and affiliate in UVM’s Gund Institute for Environment.

Only in recent years have advances in genomics—and understanding how genetics play out in whole organisms—made it realistic for crop breeders to be able to identify traits in wild plants and selectively breed them into domestic stock. In wild chickpea relatives, von Wettberg and the team—with support from USAID and the National Science Foundation—discovered many useful traits, including “striking resistance to insect pests,” he says. But these will only be useful, he notes, if they can be bred into plants without causing them to lose key qualities that farmers need, like growing upright instead of along the ground and seed hulls that don’t shatter during harvest. “We’re now in an age where we can pretty easily figure out what genes control those differences,” von Wettberg says, keeping the qualities that mechanized farming requires, “while adding in resistance to drought, disease, and pests.”

The genetic material the scientists extracted, and the seeds they collected, greatly expand the global stock of chickpea relatives available to science—and will now be part of international seed and germplasm banks that researchers and breeders can use indefinitely.  But, the scientists note, there is an urgent need to collect and conserve the wild relatives of many crops. “They are threatened by habitat fragmentation and loss of native landscapes,” von Wettberg says. “Where we were collecting plants in 2013 is now a war zone.”

Source: UVM News

A 2017 study showing that Black and Hispanic drivers in Vermont were more likely than White drivers to be stopped and searched by state and local police, and less likely to be found with contraband, was welcomed by many in the state’s law enforcement community for providing valuable feedback that could be put to good use in training programs. 

But questions were also raised about the study’s methodology and the reliability of its data. 

In response, the authors conducted a new analysis, “A Deeper Dive into Racial Disparities in Policing in Vermont,” just released, that uses more sophisticated statistical analysis to answer critiques about methodology and addresses data concerns. 

The new study confirms the earlier findings, said Stephanie Seguino, a professor of Economics at the University of Vermont and the lead author of both studies. 

It also contains analysis of new contraband data from the Vermont State Police suggesting that racial stereotypes about potential drug traffickers, at least as identified in traffic policing in the state, are inaccurate.

“The goal of this work,” said Seguino, “is to provide a service both to law enforcement and the community on ways to use data to answer questions about the role of race in policing. Given its importance, we wanted to make sure our 2017 findings held, even with more sophisticated analytical techniques. The new study confirms the earlier conclusions.” Nancy Brooks, a visiting associate professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell, was co-author of both studies.

Context did not affect results

A chief criticism of the earlier study was that it did not take into account the context of the traffic stops, Seguino said.

“There was a legitimate concern that the stops and searches could have been prompted by other factors – age, time of day, gender, for example – rather than the race of the driver,” she said. “That was something we wanted to investigate.”  

After controlling for the contextual factors, using a statistical technique called logistical regression analysis, the study came to virtually the same conclusions, Seguino said.

Blacks were 2.7 to 3.9 times more likely to be stopped (depending on how many of the additional factors were used in the analysis) compared with 3.9 in the earlier study.

Hispanics were 2.5 to 3 times more likely to be stopped compared with 2.9 times in the earlier study.

“The more complex statistical analysis demonstrated that our original results hold,” Seguino said.

The earlier study also found that Black and Hispanic drivers, though more likely to be stopped and searched, were less likely to be caught with contraband.

After controlling for the other factors, the new analysis came to a similar conclusion: Blacks and Hispanics who were stopped and searched were about half as likely to be found with contraband compared to White drivers.

“Adding controls for a variety of contextual factors had little effect not only on racial disparities in the probability of being searched but also of contraband being found during a search,” Seguino said. 

Black and Hispanic drivers: No hard drugs found

The earlier study’s findings prompted the researchers to ask an additional question in the new study: How did the contraband that was found compare between Black and Brown drivers and their White counterparts? 

Publicly available information on traffic stops and searches indicates only that contraband was found without specifying its type. At the researchers’ request, the Vermont State Police provided this additional data for traffic stop searches in 2016.

Marijuana was the contraband mostly commonly found, according to the new analysis – making up 71.5 percent of the total.

Heroin, cocaine and opioids combined were found in 10 percent of all searches yielding contraband, but their racial distribution in traffic stops and searches was revealing.

During 2016, these hard drugs were found only in the cars of White drivers with none found during searches of Black and Hispanic drivers.

“With samples sizes so small,” (White drivers were stopped and searched by state police a total of 398 times, Blacks and Hispanics a total of 38 times) “we can’t make statistical inferences about this data,” Seguino said.  “But the data are at the very least illustrative, suggesting that the stereotype that searches of drivers of color are more likely to result in contraband of heroin, cocaine, and opioids than found on White drivers is inaccurate, at least for 2016 for Vermont State Police. More data would be helpful to see if this holds true for other agencies and over time.”

Data flaws also examined

The new study also addressed concerns that the 2017 paper’s conclusions may be unreliable because they were based on flawed and inconsistent data provided by the state police and municipal police departments.

“Every data set in every study has flaws,” said Nancy Brooks, co-author and Visiting Associate Professor at Cornell University. “With that said, we did not find any evidence of serious miscoding or overt efforts to manipulate the data in the dataset law enforcement agencies provided.”

The earlier study – which brought to light some inconsistencies in data gathering and coding – has had a positive impact on police departments statewide, spurring them to bring consistency to the collection and coding processes and to implement training on how to gather and record data accurately.

“In sum,” Seguino said, “the use of more rigorous statistical techniques does not in any meaningful way change the nature of our 2017 study. They simply reinforce the racial differences we reported earlier.”

Source: UVM News

While Richard Ross traveled in the Middle East in the summer of 2006 photographing for his collection titled “Architecture of Authority,” the walls of Beirut began to crumble. With “options disappearing fast,” Ross escaped to Syria with a driver from Damascus who knew the mountain roads. “It sounds sexy and dramatic,” he says, “but there was really no fear, just a lot of waiting.” The photographer and professor of art at the University of California-Santa Barbara has traveled the world exploring challenging places and situations in pursuit of his work, which often blurs the boundaries of photojournalism and fine art. Ross’s images from the prison at Guantanamo Bay illustrated a 2005 cover story of Time Magazine; they also appear in his “Architecture of Authority” collection, featured in an Aperture traveling exhibit.

All Four Burners

Ross’s interests as a photographer range widely. One book features his photos of bomb shelters; his “Fovea” collection gathers 35 years of images taken with a cheap plastic camera; “Leela,” couples hundreds of Ross’s portraits of his daughter with her own journal entries to create a brave look into the transition of adolescence. Working as a principal photographer for the Getty Museum also numbers among Ross’s pursuits and it led to fine art photography exploring items in storage, from the world’s natural history museums to a vast storeroom of vintage Nike gear. The photographer says he doesn’t try to separate his editorial and fine art work. “They’re pretty tight. One feeds the other. It’s like cooking. You don’t use just one burner; you get all four going at once.” And he doesn’t regret the loss of artistic control that being a photojournalist sometimes requires. “You learn to work with other people,” Ross says. “It gets beyond the pure ego of the artist.”

Poli Sci

“Barely an adolescent” when his parents dropped him off at Wills Hall, Ross was a 16-year-old Jewish kid from New York City paired with a roommate who “had never seen a Jew.” He had never been to Vermont before that trip, but quickly grew to love mid-1960s Burlington. A political science major and chemistry minor as a UVM undergraduate, Ross says the lessons of professors such as Donald Gregg and Raul Hilberg “influence me to this day.” That lasting impact paired with the influence of his wife, Cissy, a longtime journalist, to nudge Ross’s art to evolve “from work that was unabashedly beautiful to work that is more politically active.”

See more of his work on his website.

Ross’s recent work explores the juvenile justice system. He will a deliver a public talk, “Art as a Weapon of Social Change,” in the Livak Ballroom of the Davis Center on April 2, 2018, 4-7 p.m., and his photos will be on display in the Davis Center’s Fireplace Lounge through the month of April.

A version of this story originally appeared in Vermont Quarterly, Fall 2006.

Source: UVM News

Digging a hole in most major cities – for new construction or infrastructure repair – is no minor undertaking.

With a dozen or more separate utilities required to inspect the ground under the dig site for a welter of obstructions like water, sewer and gas pipes, electric lines and electric generators – some so old they don’t appear on city maps – the permitting process can take 18 months or more.  

Transformational new technology being developed jointly by the University of Vermont and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga could reduce the inspection process to an afternoon’s work.

The ongoing research project, “Underground Infrastructure Sensing,” recently won a Smart 50 Award from a coalition that includes Smart Cities Connect, the Smart Cities Connect Foundation and US Ignite honoring the 50 “most transformative smart projects each year.”

The technology, which is being supported by two National Science Foundation grants and one from U.S. Ignite, was showcased in a featured demo at the Smart Cities Connect national conference in Kansas City on March 29.

The project’s goal is bold, said Dryver Huston, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Vermont, and the project’s principal investigator.

When the technology is fully developed, “a person with augmented reality goggles or a specially equipped smart phone or tablet will be able to walk over the area that needs to be inspected, look into the device and see in detail what’s underground six to 12 feet down,” he said.

(In this video, augmented reality software converts a grainy scan of a pipe buried under sand, captured with a ground penetrating radar system, to a perfectly rendered 3-D object visible with augmented reality goggles.)

Ground-penetrating radar with video-game like imagery

The project, which Huston describes as “cognitive” ground penetrating radar, has two major components.

At the University of Vermont, researchers – including electrical engineering professor Tian Xa, Huston’s UVM collaborator – are refining an advanced ground penetrating radar, or GPR, system Huston developed that can peer deep underground to detect buried infrastructure, some of it dating to the mid-19^th century, and create scans of what it sees.

The researchers are able to locate scans in a geographic space the program can remember and knit together into a map – the cognitive part of the project – by using a common 3D scanning smart phone app.

The phone then converts the grainy radar scans to clearly recognizable, nuanced three-dimensional objects using augmented reality software, commonly used for video game development.

“The net result is that the system knows where you are, knows what’s underneath, and can show you detailed images of what’s there,” Huston said. 

Computing at the edge

In its other major component, researchers at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga, led by Dalei Wu, an assistant professor of Computer Science and Engineering, are developing an edge computing platform that will enable the huge amount of data generated by the UVM team’s technology package to be processed near the data collection site – at its “edge” – so it can be quickly relayed back to the radar operator in real time as the area is being mapped – or, later, to utility or construction workers who are walking the site to see what lies underneath.  

Conventional cloud computing that relied on a faraway centralized server could not provide this feedback loop without frequent breaks and longs delays in the visuals.

Wu’s team is also developing an encryption system that will keep the infrastructure data secure as it flows back and forth, addressing a key concern of safety and law enforcement officials. 

“Ground-truthing” shows technology is on track

After working on technical development for three years, Huston and his team have spent the last six months “ground-truthing” the radar scans and the associated technology on the University of Vermont campus and in the neighboring town of Winooski, with Burlington scheduled for the spring.

In partnership with the university’s physical plant team and city workers in Winooski, Huston and his team took scans of underground infrastructure at dig sites before the work took place, then compared what the GPR showed with what was actually there.

“It checked out,” Huston said.

Similar work took place in Chattanooga last December, with the edge computing component added. 

Wu’s team was able to transfer the huge amount of data generate by the GPR and the 3-D scanning software from a street near the university back to a server on the campus in real time, a technical challenge of the highest order, Wu said. He is also making headway in developing encryption systems.

“We paved the way to go further,” he said.

A system like the one being developed by Huston and Wu is sorely needed. According to the American Public Works Association, an underground utility line is hit, on average, every 60 seconds in the United States, which costs national economy billions of dollars. A study by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences found that only 35 percent of municipal utility records are complete and up to date.

Both Burlington and Chattanooga are U.S. Ignite cities with high speed gigabit networks. The work between Huston and Wu is being facilitated by this high speed connection.

Source: UVM News

Tropical forests have been called the lungs of the planet. They soak up vast quantities of carbon dioxide, hold the world’s greatest diversity of plants and animals, and employ millions of people. And these hot ecosystems—often a patchwork of trees and grasslands—are being deeply altered by logging and other land use change.

Now, a team of scientists have made a fundamental discovery about how fires on the edges of these forests control their shape and stability. Their study implies that when patches of tropical forest lose their natural shape it could contribute to the sudden, even catastrophic, transformation of that land from trees to grass.

The new knowledge could help protect tropical forests—and allow land managers to build new tools to predict the stability of both individual forest patches and larger regional-scale forests.

The study was published March 26 in the journal Ecology Letters.

Law of the forest

Using high-resolution satellite data from protected forests in the savanna region of the Brazilian Cerrado, the scientists found that the shape of these natural forests follow a predictable mathematical relationship between a forest’s perimeter and its area—regardless of its climate region or its size. They call this a “3/4 power law” and it roughly means the forests all tend toward shapes that are neither skinny like a line, nor round and smooth like a circle. “If a forest could grow easily in all directions, we’d expect a circle,” says Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, a computer scientist at the University of Vermont who is the lead author on the new study, “but what we actually see is more dendritic, a bit like an octopus or deformed circle.”

The team of six scientists—that included modelers, ecologists and physicists from UVM, the Santa Fe Institute, Stanford, Boston University, Princeton, and the University of Washington—show that the 3/4 law holds true for tiny forest fragments not much bigger than a basketball court up to large forest patches covering dozens of square miles. 

The scientists combined their understanding of real-world data with the results of a new computer model to explain why this happens: fires, that burn easily in the grasslands surrounding forests—and singe the forests’ wet edges—are in constant battle with the forests’ expansive growth out into grasslands.  This interplay at the edge between grass and forest, the scientists discovered, creates forest patches that converge on a steady-state shape.

The results of the scientists’ model matched the observed results from real forests in Brazil. And an experiment the scientists ran on their model shows that the fate of forest patches over time—whether they expand or contract—is determined by their initial shape. Those with compact shapes of all sizes, over time, converge on the more octopus-like 3/4-power-scaling relationship*, while those with skinny shapes and larger perimeter-to-area ratios collapsed, disappearing into grasslands or fragmenting into very small patches.

Which means that this relationship between a forest’s perimeter and its area may help predict the stability of individual forest patches. The scientists are optimistic that the study can lead to practical tools that show how far a managed forest patch deviates from this natural geometry will help to determine its stability over time.    

State change

And the new research presents insights at a larger, regional scale into the possible fate of Brazil’s forests. “Stepping back and considering the macro scale—not looking at the shape of every patch, but, instead, at the state of the entire system—the model suggests that the collapse from forest to grassland can be dramatic,” says Andrew Berdahl, a researcher at the Santa Fe Institute and the senior author on the study. “These local, small-scale effects—perimeter growth and edge burning—can lead to a critical transition across a whole forest region between a forest-dominated-state and a grass-dominated-state.” And once large areas of forest switch to grass it can be difficult to recover the forests. “It is like stepping off a cliff,” says Berdahl. “You can’t simply step back up.”

Ecologists have historically looked at the elements within a forest to understand its condition—often focusing on its plants and animals—but there has been little exploration of the geometry of forests and how this might matter. The new study shows a powerful role for fire driving the shape of Brazil’s tropical forests, “and we’d now like to see if this pattern holds true in other parts of the world,” says UVM’s Hébert-Dufresne, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and part of UVM’s Complex Systems Center. “Say in Africa we find that elephants pushing over trees changes the equation, or dryness in Australia—that would be very interesting.” And he’d like to expand the research to see whether the relationship observed in the new model—derived from wild forests—holds true in logged and other managed forests in Brazil.

“Our fundamental point though is that a forest’s shape is very important,” he says, “and that its shape is directly related to its stability.”

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* Side note for math whizzes: the scientists use “3/4” as shorthand for data that created a slope near .71, intruigingly falling between the 2/3 ratio that the physics of space-filling processes would suggest and the 3/4 scaling that some biologists once invested with near-mystical powers. More on this here.

Source: UVM News