I am a graduate student in the Plant Ecology Lab at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, through the Curriculum for the Environment and Ecology.
I received my bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2005, with majors in biology and western civilization, and a certificate in medieval studies.
Curriculum in Ecology
Coates, CB#3275
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599
My work is concerned with connecting tree distributions with species traits, and issues of scale. It depends on the use of large scale vegetation databases, and their analysis with tool tested through simulation modeling. One piece of this is refining estimates of niche width (generalism).
As an exercise, I created a simplified tree with Prezi. It contains the major taxa of vascular plants in the temperate eastern United States; presently down to family.
I am neither a taxonomist nor a botanist, so it could easily contain errors or oversights, but perhaps it will be useful to you.
I do much of my work in the programming language R, so have had cause to develop a few tools which might be useful to scientists.