As I wrap up my time at UC Davis this week, I’ve been reflecting on the last five years—what we built, who we built it with, and where my head at was during all of it.

Just a few months prior to COVID, I showed up to an empty lab space with a bunch of wild ideas, a half-decent soldering iron, and zero clue where the guardrails were. Like most new Assistant Professors, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. How do I draw the line between too much and too little? Will any of this even work? What is the point? It felt chaotic. Not pure chaos. Semi-organized chaos. There was a vision, but the roadmap was less clear.

At the beginning, I said yes to everything. There was too much to be excited about it. Within two years the lab grew to 13 people (7 grad students, 4 postdocs, 1 project scientist, 1 lab manager), leaving me with more projects to manage than I had time for. But we did it. And it wasn’t possible without the tremendous support and leadership of the first cohort of postdocs/project scientists in the lab. As they’ve moved on to government research and faculty positions the lab has been held together by the graduate students and techs, many of whom have finished and moved onto cool new jobs of their own. Sustaining things in an academic lab is hard. 3-5 year grant cycles makes it especially tricky. People graduate, grants dry up, funding landscapes change...keeping the energy alive is challenging. But thanks to new members with new perspectives we've kept up that energy. I've been extraordinarily lucky - turns out the people you hire are everything.

With their help, what we built wasn’t just sensors, doohickeys and models to help understand plants. We built a community of smart, hilarious, curious, generous people who weren’t afraid to try something new. We tinkered, we broke stuff, we de-bugged and re-wrote code in the field in every weather condition possible. Field trucks got stuck in the mud, research towers were taken down by storms, and there was seemingly endless remote troubleshooting of equipment; but somehow, we managed to turn a bunch of scattered ideas into real science that I continue to be proud of. This is how research works.

Over the past five years, our work took us to some incredible places: the redwood and sequoia forests of California, snow-covered boreal in Alaska and Saskatchewan, tropical rainforests in Costa Rica, sub-alpine forests of Colorado, (the underrated and incredibly cool) longleaf pine forests of Florida, plus the countless vineyards, orchards and fields across the Central Valley, Napa and Sonoma. We’ve climbed more towers, clipped more instruments on leaves, and set up more sampling routines than I can count. Along the way, we built things—mobile scanning spectrometers, field phenotyping platforms, open-source workflows, and long-term datasets that now live in public archives. These things have fun names like TSWIFT, MIDNIGHTS, BEYONCE, and CARDI-C. We are serious scientists, I promise.

The fieldwork was often messy and unpredictable - and we had data gaps all over the place -but that’s how science works. New field datasets enabled us to explore the drivers of seasonal patterns of photosynthesis in evergreen and deciduous forests, how drought-induced tipping points might lead to forest recovery or collapse, and that sensors mounted on towers and ATVs can tell us a lot about plant health, productivity, and even berry chemistry. We’ve also begun to explore how genetic varieties of plants perform under different climate/management conditions. List goes on, and much of this work is forthcoming.

Behind all the science is the people. I’ve had the chance to work with an incredible group of students, postdocs, techs, and collaborators. Too many to list. Some of you wired up towers with zero instructions and figured it out anyway. Some of you wrote code to program spectrometers so we didn’t have to pay for commercial licenses. Some of you asked a question at lab meeting that changed the entire direction of a paper. And a lot of you put in the hard, invisible work—pre-dawn measurements, coding late, debugging sensors, hauling equipment, mentoring each other—holding this thing together through fires, pandemics, and endless Zooms.

After five years, I don’t know if I ever figured out the “right” way to run a lab. But I do know that what we built at Davis was real—it was honest, collaborative, chaotic, and full of heart. And I’m bringing that same energy with me to Montana: new trees, new campus, same vibes.

I am confident the decision to move to the W.A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation at the University of Montana is the right next step—for the lifestyle, for the kind of science I want to keep doing, and for the communities I want to be part of. It is bittersweet, but I could not be more excited to be closer to family, friends, and the landscapes I love in the Inland Northwest.

That said, the UC Davis chapter isn’t closing overnight. I’ll stay on as an adjunct, continuing to advise the PhD students and postdocs who are wrapping up their work. For a while, we’ll keep holding joint lab meetings across time zones, sharing code, field photos, and the occasional existential research question. Eventually, the Davis lab will wind down, but its roots will always be part of what comes next. It's my primary goal to continue to support people in the lab that stay at UC Davis, and I think we have a good plan to make that work.

Now, more than ever, it’s important that we defend science, build communities that uplift each other, and continue the important work we all do to better understand our planet. Given the current situation, we will lean our ability to be scrappy and creative, and do the best we can with resources available.

Thanks for making this chapter such a good one. I am eternally grateful for all the help and support from colleagues, friends, students and staff at the University of California, Davis.

-Troy Magney