Ryan recently attended the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting, which this year was held in Portland, Oregon. Roughly five thousand people were in attendance. Ryan presented the lab’s work on island biogeography in a session titled “Turn and Face the Strain: Changing Signatures of Niche Processes in Disease and Community Diversity” that aimed to establish links between models in community ecology and models in disease ecology.

The successful conference was marred only by haze drifting down from fires in British Columbia and Washington state, leading to polluted air in Portland reminiscent of that in Singapore during Indonesia’s burning season.

Haze in Portland, August 2017

Mount St. Helens, to the north of Portland, shrouded in a light haze