I was recently asked to comment on the potential impact of the 2017 solar eclipse on the behavior of birds. Discover magazine wrote this cool article about the topic:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/citizen-science-salon/2017/08/07/look-down-look-all-around-during-the-total-solar-eclipse/#.WcKNDIxSxPY

I am proud to present the first product of a collaboration with Michal Bogdziewicz, a colleague based at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. Michal got his hands on a neat seed production and pollen monitoring data set for oaks and beech in Poland, and he used it to test several hypotheses about the drivers of mast-seeding in these closely related, yet very different groups of trees. We found that in oaks, flowering synchrony of trees, as measured by the length of pollen availability period, plays a major role in driving seed production, while in beech it was the actual amount of available pollen that correlated most strongly with seed crops the following fall. The results highlight that there are multiple mechanistic pathways that converge to mast-seeding. The study was published in our favorite journal, Ecology!

Read it here: ​http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy.1951/full