Prarthini has submitted her Honours thesis titled “Conservation status of the Malayan horned frog, Megophrys nasuta, in Singapore”. Part of her thesis has been published in Nature in Singapore. Congratulations, Prarthini!

Neutral biodiversity models predict species ages that are unrealistically long—sometimes exceeding even the age of the Earth. But the exact extent of the problem with these models has been unknown until now, because we have lacked analytical species age formulas appropriate to ecological contexts. In our new paper, we have derived such formulas and used them to provide new neutral estimates of species ages of tropical trees. We show that neutral species ages are still too long, but by about a factor of ten less than previously thought.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040580914000161

Photo by Christian Ziegler

Richard completed his Bachelor’s degree in Forestry at Bangor University in Wales and is now in the Environmental Management MSc programme at NUS. For his MSc thesis he will conduct an economic evaluation of the ecosystem services in Singapore’s Central Catchment Nature Reserve. Welcome, Richard!

Catharina completed her MSc at Uppsala University, Sweden, her MRes at Imperial College London, UK, and her BSc at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. In her PhD she will use quantitative modelling tools to study the ecology and conservation of amphibians in Southeast Asia. Welcome, Catharina!

In collaboration with Cui Jinqiang and Ben Chen in NUS Engineering and Shawn Lum at Nanyang Technological University, we recently trialled the use of a below-canopy quadrocopter drone mounted with LiDAR for the purpose of measuring tree diameters. Initial results are promising.

Click here for the paper.

Our new study investigating the relationship between tree diversity and biomass and productivity in 25 CTFS plots is available here. The paper was selected as an Editor’s Choice article.