I found an obituary for Steve www.renner-wikoffchapel.com/obituary/Ste...

Wind and frost have surprisingly strong effects on global patterns in leaf cuticle thickness! Latitude, biome and taxonomy matter too. Other climate variables not so much. #trait research from international team including @lawrensack.bsky.social @westobymark.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1111/nph....

For the connoisseur of plant traits: the environmental associations of kidney-bean vs dumbbell-shaped stomatal types and their implications. Similar climate associations of stomatal size and density for grasses and non-grasses across communities. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How do parasitic plants find their prey? New study shows dodder vines use touch sensitivity and light detection to hunt victims. These master grafters even attempt to parasitize metal objects. Learn more: wp.me/pdRZhH-m3g #Botany #PlantScience 🧪

Leaf functional traits, insect #herbivory, & fungal damage on early Eocene leaf compression #fossils, Dolus Hill, Wyoming New #AJB research by Claudia Richbourg, Lily Jackson, Kevin Chamberlain, Ian Miller, Kirk Johnson & Ellen Currano doi.org/10.1002/ajb2... #botany #plantscience #paleobotany

We found environmental plasticity in Pinus radiata phloem under light limitation and foliar pathogenic infection, with a reduction in phloem cross-sectional area. Have a look here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... a collaboration between New Zealand and @umr-iam.bsky.social

Very excited to see this paper out! Led by @schwilk.org, with @azhar06.bsky.social @ecologybrad.bsky.social @rachaelnolan.bsky.social @alefidelis.bsky.social @ioliverasmenor.bsky.social @dendromecon27.bsky.social @profalistairsmith.bsky.social bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

🌿 Excited to share our latest preprint! We tracked how plasmodesmata numbers evolved across the path from C₃ → C₄ photosynthesis in Flaveria - and found a stepwise increase in cell-to-cell connectivity. Thoughts or feedback are most welcome 😊 #PlantScience

The beauty of trees as lidar point clouds... 3D pixel art 🌳 🧊 Here, an oak forest stand from the North of France, with a dense understory. Voxelised with AMAPVox @umramap.bsky.social, from our terrestrial lidar scans! @jonlen.bsky.social #EDYSAN @terschki.bsky.social

Journal of Ecology Blog for Medeiros et al. 2025! jecologyblog.com/2025/04/08/p...

OpenAI’s new image model is great at botany

Wait, what? I took ichthyology in college, and at no point did they explain to me that the reason early vertebrates were dominated by cartilaginous fish wasn't simplicity, but because PLANTS had not yet released enough calcium from rocks for it to become bioavailable for bone development. 🤯 🐟🌎

Balanophora is a parasitic plant that lacks chlorophyll, and steals its nutrients from tree roots. It lives beneath the rainforest floor, where once in a while, it sends up an orb that glows like the moon.

Endophytic #bacteria discovered in oil body organelles of the #liverworts Marchantia polymorpha & Radula complanata New #AJB research by Blair Young, Barbara Thiers, James White, & Lena Struwe bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... #botany #plantscience

🌿The architecture of plant trait networks is more interconnected & complex in communities with higher functional richness under less arid climates 🧪 🌏 buff.ly/iok0dnU

Simplification of woody plant trait networks among communities along a climatic aridity gradient - Camila Medeiros, Santiago Trueba, Chris Henry, Leila Fletcher, Jim Lutz, Rodrigo Méndez Alonzo, Nathan Kraft, Lawren Sack - Journal of Ecology t.co/F6VWVLJ6xl @nathanjbkraft.bsky.social

The determination of leaf size on the basis of developmental traits - Zeqing Ma, Thomas N. Buckley, Lawren Sack - New Phytologist @tombuckleylab.bsky.social t.co/EFgmQo1qWy

A curious, modest man with an encyclopaedic knowledge. No ego but a quiet self-confidence that inspired many. No doubt many publications in the coming years will report innovative ideas that he thought of decades ago….

Very rapid #thermophilization & #xerophilisation of grassland #plant #communities 🌾🌼🍀🌸in the California Floristic Province #CFP attributed to #climate #change ⬇️ An important study relying on both field surveys & long-term experiments ⬇️ Congrats to Kai Zhu & team shorturl.at/3FsVm

Excited to see this paper from Mary Van Dyke out in press- she measures how rainfall manipulations alter the timing of the life cycles of California annual plants, and explore implications for species coexistence. Thanks to Sedgwick UCNRS Reserve for facilitating her research! #AJB

📣Now Free Access: The Agavoideae: an emergent model clade for CAM evolutionary biology Get the Paper:

mvh: An R tool to assemble and organize virtual #herbaria from openly available specimen images New in #AppsPlantSci by @tvasconcelos.bsky.social & @jboyko.bsky.social bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... @r-foundation.bsky.social @gbif.org #botany #biodiversity #iamabotanist

Here is a moment of peace for your timeline. Little River, Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Interesting new paper on inference with observational data in ecology onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

What limits rubisco function? Is it the chemical mechanism? Evolution? In this paper, @prywes.bsky.social et. al explore this question by assaying >99% of single amino acid mutants in Form II rubisco (1/7) doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Ever wonder what snow in the swamp would look like? This is 5 miles into the Louisiana swamps in the Atchafalaya basin... it's unreal... having lived down there for the first 28 years of my life, we never saw anything like this. Smashed records. Curtesy of Garrett Roberts.

New Tansley review paper from Zoe Pierrat & friends in @newphyt.bsky.social linking proximal remote sensing with ecosystem fluxes! Synergies and best practices for hyperspectral reflectance, SIF, thermal, microwave and lidar 🌈🌲🗼🛰️🧪 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Very excited this paper is now out in Ecology Letters onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.... #causalsky

Humans living 780,000 years ago in what is now Israel ate a variety of starch-rich plants and yellow waterlily rhizomes, indicating advanced cognitive abilities, according to a study of plant microremains found on stone food-processing tools. In PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

From division to ‘divergence’: to understand wood growth across timescales, we need to (learn to) manipulate it

Last day in the USA. Spent well visiting @lawrensack.bsky.social. Super impressed that Lawren works in a building with ‘BOTANY’ in the title! Ok, so the dept is EEB…..but botany is clearly the heart and engine room! And at the risk of stirring possums, let’s MAKE BOTANY GREAT AGAIN!

Here's the reality about the #LAFires this week: this isn't the first time ANY of these places have burned. Not even close. In 2018, we mapped CA fire history to look at fire frequency across SoCal. Santa Monica Mtns area burns more than anywhere else -- up to once per decade in a given spot. 🧵

Resolving the contrasting leaf hydraulic adaptation of C3 and C4 grasses - Alec Baird et al. - New Phytologist - nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... @colinplants.bsky.social @cscoffoni.bsky.social @hcochard.bsky.social @erikajedw.bsky.social

🔥 in Ecology Letters 🔥 #Traits describing hydraulic strategies and deciduousness explain the occurrence trends of almost 300 #rainforest #tree species across a steep rainfall gradient in Australia. #FunctionalTraits dx.doi.org/10.1111/ele....

**FORESTGEO STAFF SCIENTIST POSITION!** We are hiring a Research Ecologist to focus on Central and South American Forest Dynamics, to be based at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Smithsonian staff scientist positions are excellent, as is the ForestGEO team! Come be our colleague!

A Theoretical Framework to Quantify Ecosystem Pressure-Volume Relationships onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Sensitive Hydraulic and Stomatal Decline in Extreme Drought Tolerant Species of California Ceanothus http://doi.org/10.1111/pce.15208 @ZailaaJ @cscoffoni5 @TomBuckleyLab @brodersen_lab @strueba_ @fletcher_leila @marvin_browne

The Ecosystem as Super-organ/ism, Revisited: Scaling Hydraulics to Forests under Climate Change https://academic.oup.com/icb/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/icb/icae073/7695291

Pinpointing the causal influences of stomatal anatomy and behavior on minimum, operational, and maximum leaf surface conductance https://academic.oup.com/plphys/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/plphys/kiae292/7679682

Statement to Students and the Campus Community from Faculty within the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department, UCLA https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o_gJI_zDyNlXQkliPDuc_zAsGV3UL_LJoJErAemnh-k/edit @nathanjbkraft @ElsaOrdway @VanMSavage @s_m_aguillon @nanditagarud...

Ingenious discoveries from a year of UC research: UCLA botanists figured out how to “ask” plants what they need to survive climate change https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/12-ingenious-discoveries-year-uc-research

Allometries of cell and tissue anatomy and photosynthetic rate across leaves of C3 and C4 grasses - Baird - Plant, Cell & Environment https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pce.14741

Plants have something to say about climate. A new study unlocks their 'language' https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2023-09-28/plants-have-something-to-say-about-climate-a-new-study-unlocks-their-language-essential-california

How to save plants from climate change? Just ask them https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/plant-leaves-wood-conservation-clues-climate-change

Scientists and startups are looking to boost the natural processes that remove carbon dioxide from the air https://www.wsj.com/articles/carbon-capture-startups-tech-global-warming-3a597f92 via @WSJ

Why haven't all the jacarandas bloomed yet? When will purple reign again in L.A.? https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/story/2023-05-23/when-will-jacarandas-bloom-in-los-angeles

The 12th annual UC Davis Plant Sciences Symposium 2023 will focus on “Plants in the climate crisis”; with an outstanding line-up of speakers tackling the 21st century’s most significant global challenges. https://www.plantsciences.ucdavis.edu/news/plant-sciences-symposium-2023

Happy New Year 2023!

Congratulations to the excellent ⁦⁦⁦@alecsbaird⁩, recipient of the UCLA Life Sciences Excellence in Research Award!!

Though 1883 is a great show, Captain Shea will live to regret showing oak tree leaves when teaching the pioneers to avoid poison oak #HireABotanyConsultant #RashDecision @Tombstone_Coors @1883Official