College of Sciences

Plants, like animals and people, seek refuge from climate change. And when they move, they take ecosystems with them. To understand why and how plants have trekked across landscapes throughout time, researchers are calling for a new framework. The key to protecting biodiversity in the future may be understanding the past. Jenny McGuire, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and the School of Biological Sciences, spearheaded a U.S. National Science Foundation-supported paper on the topic in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. McGuire and her collaborators highlight the outstanding needs for successful future conservation efforts. The paper brings together conservation research that illuminates the complex and constantly evolving dynamics brought on by climate change and the ever-shifting ways humans use land. These factors, McGuire said, interact over time to create dynamic changes and illustrate the need to incorporate time perspectives into conservation strategies by looking deep into the past.

A small but growing group of researchers is working to make science more accessible to scientists with limited vision. Innovative software and modes of presentation are helping to broaden access to scientific literature. Sonification provides a way for scientists with visual limitations to "see" data; by translating numerical values into sounds with certain parameters — for example, a star’s brightness might be encoded as pitch — researchers can home in on important changes. Highcharts, a charting library service, developed its free tool for exploring charts with sonification at Georgia Tech's Sonification Lab, an interdisciplinary research group based in the School of Psychology and the School of Interactive Computing.