Wake Forest graduate Joe Napier worked on a summer project with Erin M. and Rob Heckman last summer at the University of North Carolina. His project asked how drought and herbivory (clipping) affected competition between two common grass species. He found that clipping ameliorated the effect of drought for one species. Using a model parameterized with the greenhouse experiment data, he asked whether environmental fluctuation in water availability and herbivory could stabilize coexistence of the two grass species and found that it did not. The paper is provisionally accepted at Oecologia. Joe is now a PhD student with Feng-Sheng Hu at the University of Illinois.

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