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This article profiles American Indian Higher Education Consortium's (AIHEC) President and CEO Carrie Billy. Billy's experience in law, a U.S. senator's office, and in the legislative and administrative branches of government is crucial for an institution that relies on state and federal legislative processes to gain funding and support. AIHEC is a nonprofit organization that was formed in 1972 by America's first six tribal college presidents to influence policy, establish higher education programs, and network with federal agencies, other institutions, and each other to address the evolving needs of tribal higher education institutions. AIHEC has 37 member institutions, and the presidents of each of them serve on the board. She says the organization's biggest challenge is addressing the needs of such a diverse group of institutions. Some of the colleges are over 30-40 years old, and others are still fledglings. In the face of a new administration, Billy looks forward to working for greater recognition of tribal colleges and to facilitating a greater understanding within the federal agencies, the private sector, and Congress.

Investigating how trophic interactions influence the β‐diversity of meta‐communities is of paramount importance to understanding the processes shaping biodiversity distribution. Here, we apply a statistical method for inferring the strength of spatial dependencies between pairs of species groups. Using simulated community data generated from a multi‐trophic model, we showed that this method can approximate biotic interactions in multi‐trophic communities based on β‐diversity patterns across groups. When applied to soil multi‐trophic communities along an elevational gradient in the French Alps, we found that fungi make a major contribution to the structuring of β‐diversity across trophic groups. We also demonstrated that there were strong spatial dependencies between groups known to interact specifically (e.g. plant‐symbiotic fungi, bacteria‐nematodes) and that the influence of environment was less important than previously reported in the literature. Our method paves the way for a better understanding and mapping of multi‐trophic communities through space and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]