I think I've seen this film before... During the first Trump admin, my colleagues and I analyzed the public comments about de-listing National Monuments. Though back then, 95% of humans, form letters AND bots all supported protecting Nat'l Monuments conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Submitted my comment this morning before packing up equipment with undergraduates from my small, rural college to spend the day on Vermont's tallest peak downloading microclimate data from sensors that we installed last summer as part of an NSF-funded project.

For folks asking why bother commenting because the OMB won't care: comments help build cases for the courts by explicitly laying out harms. That's why it's really important to have your comments be as specific as possible. Also, contact your senators and reps! They actually do care about this.

I'm reading through the Tables of Contents on back issues of @newphyt.bsky.social for a lit review project and the cover photos for this journal are phenomenal. Gorgeous plants. Just beautiful.

Our Environmental Studies program threw a cook-out for Senior Night and the faculty grilling for the students was super fun and a bit cheaper than expected. How should we spend down the rest of our program budget?

Three weeks left to apply to our postdoc position on alpine plant resilience! Us: Three years of funding, an awesome collaborative team, a gorgeous study system, blueberry pie, unionized postdocs. You: A PhD and experience in ancient DNA, paleoecology, and/or plant genetics and genomics.

OMB is run by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought. Did you know that the Director of the OMB can be impeached? Congress has historically supported science—it’s why they keep rejecting Trump’s budget cuts. Vought is trying to do an end-run around Congress. There’s an easy fix for that.

The list of Ecology/Evolution/Marine Bio Labs recruiting grad students for Fall 2027 is live! PIs enter your position info here: forms.gle/MAGd4ohyPeoY... students (and PIs not recruiting) share the composite list: docs.google.com/spreadsheets... Please share widely! 🧪

Several people have asked for possible content and structure for comments regarding the proposed OMB regulations. With some suggestions from others, I have posted on example (as a Word document) for downloading). jeremymberg.github.io/jeremyberg.g... I hope this is helpful.

to be clear, this is a comment on the current moment's dumpster fire that is higher ed and scientific research funding

i fund my lab by joining my college's wellness incentive step contest with cash prizes while training for a half marathon.

This spring I took over and redesigned the only Gen Ed on plants here #IB103. We walked through every core aspect of plant bio in lectures & labs, but also through art & design. I had a blast, the evaluations are rewarding (4.9/5), the redesign got an award from the college, and a little press too!

It's June, which means even though it's not technically summer, it's basically summer. Which means it's gonna get hot out there. Which means you better look hot out there. With a shrimp shirt. Nothing hotter, in MY opinion, than fashion involving marine invertebrates. Get a shirt: SquidFacts.net

i love vermont but it's the season of the wool long underwear under my borrowed regalia at commencement

Calling all Scientists! Research Administrators! Deans! Fans of Science! No one is coming to save us. Here is your assignment. I have written a step by step, easy to understand "how-to" document to help you comment on the proposed OMB rule. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/what-we-ne...

NEW: A lot of bad has happened to American science over the last year but nothing comes even close to what’s about to happen if we don’t speak out in opposition to the OMB rule changes and I hope @aaas-socsci.bsky.social @apsphysics.bsky.social and others will launch public campaigns about this. 🧪🔭⚛️

Registration is open! Join NEBS for our August 1-2 Away Meeting in Rhode Island, featuring field trips throughout the state, a presentation, and a tour of the Brown University Herbarium. rhodora.org/meetings/ (Photos by Doug McGrady, Isabel Tribe, Bill Holmes)

More than 10% of my students listed Kate Furbish among their favorite class readings that linked art and the herbarium. The catch: there was no Kate Furbish reading. I just talked about her constantly, hyped her lousewort, invoked her ghost, and used her watercolors in lectures all term. ❤️🎨🪻

Congratulations to the 2026 recipients of the Graduate Student Research Award and the Les Mehrhoff Botanical Research Award! Visit our website to read about the impressive projects rhodora.org/awards/

For one of our final Herbarium classes I want to have students pair up and read from Craig Baxter's play "Re: Design — Adaptation of the Correspondence of Darwin and Gray" Obviously I need to make an Are you a Darwin or Are you a Gray flow chart to assist with casting.

my whole heart to this community. we'll try to carry on the wonderful, weird torch in southern vermont. www.bostonglobe.com/2026/05/16/m...

Just thinking about re-writing Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California" to be about Linnaeus searching through GBIF

In our just released paper (urls.fr/LDFfBZ), we show that collared lemming abundance can be indexed from urine left on white plastic cards placed at tunnel entrances. I think their urine colour comes from their food plants, mainly purple saxifrage, illustrated below (photo Audrey Le Pogam). 🧪🌿🌎🦊

Shout out to the class I'm teaching tonight for finally giving me excuse to make the "Flowers" vs "forbs" slides I've always meant to make Grasses flower! Sedges and rushes flower! When you say "flowers and grasses", you probably most accurately mean "forbs and graminoids"!

Just want to share a class activity I tried yesterday and my thoughts on how to improve it. The class is The Herbarium: Research, Art & Botany (yes I teach ecology at a weird little liberal arts college). The topic was Linnaeus and how he developed his ideas about plant taxonomy...

I gave my students notebooks (the late bloomer series from field notes) for reading responses (1 point/week) instead of collecting them from an outline board and at this point in the semester I just love recognizing them by handwriting.

Exciting new undergraduate research opportunities here at Carnegie Museum in Botany! Applications due March 1. drive.google.com/file/d/1jNNy...

"The soil in our part of the neighborhood was even sandy and acidic...A lot of trees don’t like the sandy soil because it drains too much, but we love it...We started playing together pretty seriously in high school, and released our first album right before graduation." 😂

Seaweed pressing as an art and a science: our newly reestablished herbarium collection at Scripps and the history behind it #Phycology

me: You can be creative in your final essays! my student: This is an interview with Margaret and Bianca, two members of hit pop rock band Arnold the Ill. The band is made up of four Eastern White Pine siblings from southwest Vermont. my student: also I designed a vintage band poster.

Hosted our final speakers for the EAB on campus pop-up last night. We were so privileged to hear from our own folks in biology and buildings and grounds, an Abenaki basket maker, a county forester, state forest health folks, academic researchers, social scientists, and a USFS forest entomologist!

“We can’t save a species a couple of months at a time. It takes decades to restore them. ... I could be documenting the decline of the species, but I’m documenting the rebound of the species. It’s such hopeful work." Good news from @ucdmarinescience.bsky.social www.pressdemocrat.com/2025/11/26/b...

I'm teaching a new class in the spring, "The Herbarium: Research, Art & Botany" I'm looking for your favorite herbarium-based research papers to fill out our reading list of peer-reviewed articles. Please share your recommendations! www.bennington.edu/curriculum/c...

looking forward to reading this

We're ready to collect some #Plantsgiving data at Bennington. How about you, @martinebotany.bsky.social?

"The analogy that I use a lot is that I live in New Hampshire and have for the last 46 years. We make maple syrup there. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup." Ken Burns (I'll be teaching mostly arts students to make maple syrup this spring) www.theringer.com/2025/11/20/n...

HOLD THE PHONE — The lover that Elizabeth Bishop lost in 'One Art' CAME BACK TO HER after the poem was published. I always assumed that the 'you' in the last stanza died, but she was just going to marry a man. WOW. www.newyorker.com/books/page-t...

Our celebratory issue of Rhodora is available! NEBS members have access through their membership AND we've made most of this issue open-access. We've been publishing since 1899, so there's a lot to celebrate and we want everyone to join in! bioone.org/journals/rho...

Reading the new alpine snowbank refugia paper at coffee shop while my kid attends a morning sewing camp reminds me of the years when her sister attended day camp at a sculpture park and I wrote manuscripts in a courtyard adjacent to a giant xylophone that kids whaled on with sticks.

My students' take on the xkcd 'types of scientific papers'. A very cool, interesting moment of reflection on the semester together. This exercise was inspired by Cindy Kohtala's blog about the meme www.cindykohtala.fi/2021/10/14/f...

We recently found Emerald Ash Borer on campus. I'm putting together a Fall 2025 pop-up course/seminar series to celebrate ash trees, mourn the arrival of EAB, and explore the ash's human and non-human relationships in the northern forest. Please share recommendations for speakers!

Spent the day in a DIY workshop with co-PIs from an NSF grant that was archived the day we were set to resubmit. Here’s the thing about scientists in a tiny state who work with small natural history collections: we get the science/teaching/conservation/outreach done. Our ROI is off the charts.

🌿 Stretching your research dollars? You’re not alone! Join us for the #Botany360 free virtual event, Botany on a Budget — a casual discussion with BSA members who have experience making research happen with limited resources. Thursday, May 8, 2025, 2–3 p.m. EST Register here: tinyurl.com/bot360

🌱 SPECIAL ISSUE CALL FOR PAPERS 🌱 The #AJB announces a call for papers for a special issue, “Plant Resilience and Conservation for a Changing Climate,” led by guest editors J. Rentsch, E. Stacy, C. Mackenzie, J. Boyd & V. Negron-Ortiz.⁣ ⁣ Deadline for proposals: May 30, 2025. bit.ly/3GcyMUG

#WithoutNSF my PhD research on the impacts of climate change on plant communities in Acadia National Park would not have been possible. Managers use our work to protect resources. Park educators & interpretive staff use our work to create signage and talk to the public. We need to fund NPS and NSF.

Thread with an email being sent to @asn-amnat.bsky.social @sse-evolution.bsky.social @systbiol.bsky.social members today calling for a Tri-society week of action for NSF: Dear members: The tri-societies (ASN, SSE,SSB) are running a ‘Week of Action for NSF’. Your engagement is crucial.

Reminder that I'm looking for grad students. Canada just decided for sanity in government, Fredericton elected a musician MP, and UNB is a great place to be. Come join me! Position is fully funded.

Amy Angert & I are recruiting 2 field technicians for demographic surveys of scarlet monkeyflower in late summer-fall. Please spread word to any potentially interested candidates! jobs.ncsu.edu/postings/217...