Welcome to ASCEND

Advancing Spectral biology in Changing ENvironments to understand Diversity

an NSF Biology Integration Institute

Art by Daniel Tschanz (from Cavender-Bares et al. 2022) — We seek to understand the causes and consequences of plant biodiversity across scales in an era of rapid global change

Image: by Daniel Tschanz from Cavender-Bares et al. 2022

Fig.1.Bio_Graphics_2020.png — We use spectral and trait biology, experiments, observations and predictive models to understand how variation at one biological scale interacts with environmental change to give rise to emergent properties at the next biological scale, ultimately influencing biodiversity from organisms to the tree of life in ecological communities and across the biosphere.

Our goal is to train the next generation of integrative biologists who apply spectral biology to understanding how life’s variation at the smallest scales influences biodiversity at all other scales, and how global change, in turn, impacts the processes that drive diversity at all scales.

Using common data types—including the reflectance of photons from the sun—we seek to integrate biology across scales from molecules to biomes

Image: Spectral reflectance (from Serbin and Townsend 2020)

We are a diverse group of scientists spanning ecology, evolution, global change biology and remote sensing. ASCEND brings together researchers from multiple institutions including University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Maine, Harvard University, Colorado State, University of Illinois, the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab and University of Zurich with partners and collaborators that span the globe.

Director: Jeannine Cavender-Bares (UMN)

Managing Director: Brett Fredericksen (UMN)

Co-Directors: Philip Townsend (UW-Madison) and Peter Reich (UMN)

ASCEND Team