Researcher Spotlight - Ryan McClory
1st October, 2024
Ryan McClory, University of Reading, is working to understand the mechanistic drivers of oak masting.
Masting is a complex reproductive behaviour of oaks; years of lean acorn crops are punctuated by great rains of acorns littering the forest floor. Ryan McClory, an Action Oak-supported researcher, has been tasked with researching this long-term phenomenon, fitted into a three year PhD, and passed his Viva last Friday.
The first two studies of his thesis used Machine Learning methods to try and unpick which factors were important mechanistic drivers of masting. The first study looked at individual variation in acorn production at Wytham Woods, Oxford. The second explored the possibility of building complex weather models to predict mast events, using a database of acorn production data collected across Europe, many of which were found via the Mastree+ dataset.
The third study of his thesis experimented with pollen source as a driver of masting, looking to understand how this can influence acorn production, with the full experiment now readable here.
And the fourth study was a write up of a collaborative experiment with the team at BIFoR. BIFoR uses litter trap data from the Free Air Carbon Enrichment Experiment to examine how increases to atmospheric CO 2 may influence mature oak communities. This study is now now readable here. Ryan also contributed to a workshop held by the world’s masting experts, read the paper formed from that workshop here.
Read Ryan’s Action Oak update, ‘Demystifying Masting, a PhD thesis on the drivers of oak masting in the UK’ in the Annual Report 2023-24.
