I’ve officially started my search for a graduate school.  Because of my migraines, I need to live somewhere with relatively constant barometric pressure.  Slow changes are ok, dinosaur teeth in the pressure plot are not.  The best places in the US and Canada for my migraines seem to be the Pacific Northwest, Southern California and Hawaii.  All I’ve got to do now is find scientists at universities in those places who do what I’m interested in doing.

Fortunately I’ve got relatively broad interests.  I’m interested in plants and what’s going to happen to them with climate change.  I’ve mostly thought about trees, but as long as I’m working with a foundation species, I think I’d be happy.  Figuring out changes in growth, reproduction, and survival is interesting.  So is figuring out what might happen after big mortality events – the legacy effects of all those plant carcasses.  I think being able to make landscape level predictions based on individual physiology is FANTASTIC.  I have experience with dendrochronology, but would be happy on a project without it.  I want a project that involves more modeling than field or lab work. Big, long term datasets make me VERY excited.  I’ve very recently started thinking that climate change might be a great opportunity for ecology to test some of our predictions about plant communities and invasive species and I would be happy working on a project that did that.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to use all CAPS in my personal statement.

So, I went through the biology/forestry/ecology departments at a bunch of universities yesterday and picked out some labs I might want to work with, but I thought I’d ask you all for suggestions in case I missed someone interesting.