If your #EGU26 schedule is not full yet, have a look at these presentations from our group: - Eco-evolutionary models meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU26/EGU26-... by @erikschwarz.bsky.social - C-N stoichiometry meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU26/EGU26-... by @majasiegenthaler.bsky.social

Heading to #EGU26? Don’t miss Stefano’s talk on coupled soil and plant responses to precipitation changes Also check out other presentations in the thread ⬇️

New paper is out We show that seed bacteria come via both reproductive tissues and the plant’s vascular pathways, but nearly 50% of the seed microbiome traces to unknown sources. Big thanks to @aabdelfattah.bsky.social for the great dataset 🍎🦠 More here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

How fungus gnats, and their names, can make science more inclusive. Believe it or not! scientistseessquirre... 🧪🌍🪲🪳

Trump and Elon Musk destroyed most of the global H.I.V. program that saved hundreds of thousands of lives in Zambia. Now the US is threatening to cut remaining support, unless Zambia gives access to the country’s mineral resources. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/25/h...

Cognition without brains? Learning and memory in microorganisms @cp-trendsmicrobiol.bsky.social Review by Andreas Messer, Leonardo Oña, and @kostchristian.bsky.social www.cell.com/trends/micro...

Chemical dialogues at the crossroads of host–bacteria interactions @cp-trendsplantsci.bsky.social by Emtinan Diab, Nicola Thome, Somayah Elsayed, @raaijmakersjm.bsky.social and @gillesvanwezel.bsky.social www.cell.com/trends/micro...

Ecological and genomic variation in ectomycorrhizal fungal exploration types Mansfield, et al. nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... @tommansfield.bsky.social @Anthomycota.bsky.social #PlantScience

⚡️20,570 Ukrainian children have been deported or forcibly displaced by Russia since the full-scale invasion, according to Bring Kids Back UA. Discover more about how Russia kidnaps Ukrainian children, including those who have parents, and changes their identity: ukraineworld.org/en/podcasts/...

🔥Boreal fungi recover very differently after fire vs. clear-cutting. Fires leave long-lasting deadwood that supports rich and red-listed species; clear-cuts do not. High deadwood + structural complexity are key, but old-growth remains irreplaceable 👉️ buff.ly/DLExOE9

Microbial communities can harbor many species that do not coexist in pairs, yet can coexist in the full community. Here we provide the mathematical foundations of emergent coexistence, and explain why it can't be predicted from pairwise tests journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Ukrainalainen ympäristötutkija kertoo, millaista tuhoa sota on tehnyt luonnolle www.hs.fi/alueet/art-2...

Micro-scale spatial metagenomics opens a new era in microbiome ecology @cp-trendsmicrobiol.bsky.social Opinion from @mizrahilab.bsky.social www.cell.com/trends/micro...

On the architecture and evolution of prokaryotic multicellularity Preprint from @escolizzi.bsky.social www.authorea.com/doi/full/10....

This @sciencenews.bsky.social piece, featuring Michael Van Nuland, explores how a warming climate and increasing drought reshape the composition and function of soil microbial communities and how these changes could disrupt ecosystems, plant health, and the global carbon cycle. 🔗 buff.ly/P9YCSsD

📢 3 #postdoc and 1 #PhD positions with Gustaf Hugelius @stockholm-uni.bsky.social (Department of Physical Geography) on permafrost and peatland mapping, funded via two new exciting collaborative projects, offering a chance to work with great international teams. See links below:

New preprint from my last postdoc on beetle–fungal networks in deadwood 🪲🍄 Across deadwood tree species and types, we show strongly modular co-occurrence networks of fungi and beetles

Why are two co-signers of the Budapest Memorandum so obsessed with pushing Ukraine to abandon its own sovereign territory? Trading real land, people and fortification for guarantees that will likely never materialize? Does the U.S. even honor any of its commitments? www.reuters.com/business/aer...

Yesterday, Russia launched 948 drones against civilians in various cities across Ukraine. They attacked a maternity hospital in Ivano-Frankivsk, private homes in Kherson, the central park in Vinnytsia, a train in the Kharkiv region, and the historic center of Lviv, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

🧪🌾VACANCY - Postdoc in fungal ecology & modelling🧬 This 2-year postdoc focuses on mycorrhizal fungal biogeography using large-scale metabarcoding data and species distribution models.🌍 Join the group of @frewecologist.bsky.social and work with us @umeaplantsciencecentre.se! 📅 Apply by 30 April

Tuesday midday terror Iranian-Russian drones are attacking Ukraine rn

An astoundingly strong heat wave has pulverized records across the western U.S. (even more records have fallen since the article was written!)

The history of Ukraine helps explain the present - if you want to understand how we got to where we are now, the Holodmor Research and Education Consortium has created a free course in the history of the Ukrainian famine. Sign up here: www.coursera.org/learn/holodo...

Postdoc (2 years) in mycorrhizal fungal biogeography & species distribution modelling @umeaplantsciencecentre.se Work with large-scale metabarcoding data and modelling. Deadline is 30th April www.umu.se/en/work-with...

Our new paper in New Phytologist. Establishing a setup to study plant responses to complex microbiomes. Arabidopsis thaliana grew larger and showed enhanced resistance to Botrytis cinerea on a microbiome conditioned by maize (benzoxazinoids). Defence priming uncouple the growth–defence trade-off.

1/2. He took the greatest military force in history, lost a war to a middle power in a week, begged the world to save him, & demanded the media lie about this & everything else. I try, but at a simple human level I do not see how anyone mistakes this man’s almost supernatural weakness for strength.

Ukraine is holding back Russia and thus fulfilling the entire traditional mission of NATO without any soldiers or sailors from other countries. Trump is meanwhile demanding NATO allies leave the continent they are supposed to be defending to join him in a doomed adventure he chose in the Middle East

I have a new review out in TiG titled, “The ecology of horizontal gene transfer”! I’ve been thinking about these ideas for years and this field is growing so fast it’s becoming impossible to review it. I hope this paper sparks discussion on different ways we can look at DNA transfer!

If we made the green energy transition this war would be unthinkable and these authoritarians wouldn’t be in power — not in the US, not in Iran, not in Saudi Arabia, not in Russia. Hydrocarbons are killing our freedom and just plain killing us.

New paper out in Journal of Ecology! How do wood-inhabiting fungi recover after disturbance in boreal forests? We compared 2 chronosequences: 🔥 unmanaged fire (4–375 yrs) 🪓 managed clear-cut (1–109 yrs) Very different diversity trajectories! 👇 besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Having a hard time keeping up with the fast-moving field of origin of eukaryotes/Asgards archaea? Our new perspective article can help, we review the status of research over the last decade and where it's going. The archaeal roots of eukaryotic life www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Four years ago, Mariupol was under siege. Journalist Evgeniy Maloletka captured some of the war’s most powerful images. Years later, he recorded every moment in The Siege of Mariupol. This is how he remembers the strike on the city’s maternity hospital 🧵

This is an unprecedented move by the US presidential administration. For the first time in five years of full-scale invasion, America has lifted sanctions against Russian oil.

Big congrats to former Lowry Lab postdoc Daniel Anstett, who's paper: "Rapid evolution predicts demographic recovery after extreme drought" is out in Science today. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Impacts of climate extremes on plant pathogens, microbiomes and plant health @natrevmicro.nature.com by @chaoxiong.bsky.social et al from @prof-braj-singh.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper from lab has mapped plant pathogen hotspots worldwide and revealed how soils naturally suppressed plant disease. Nature Communications @natcomms.nature.com Dominance and natural suppression of bacterial plant pathogens across global soils led by Min Gao www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We have a growing collection of resources for women in ecology that support, celebrate and advocate for women's roles in research and practice.  Check our collection of resources here 👇 https://f.mtr.cool/gtwczvuefr

Happy #IWD2026 to our FEMS community and to everyone working to advance microbiology across Europe and beyond. To mark the day, we are sharing reflections from across our community on the FEMS blog buff.ly/TSSQccE Thank you to all the women in microbiology for the impact you make every day.

New paper alert 📰 🎉 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Our paper explores how urban vegetation, seasonality, and socio-economic context shape the urban bioaerosols across three Canadian cities. #UrbanEcology #Aerobiome #Bioaerosols #PublicHealth #UrbanGreening #Research

Science at Risk: The Urgent Need for Institutional Support of Long-Term Ecological and Evolutionary Research in an Era of Data Manipulation and Disinformation url: academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...

A team led by ecologist @christinakaiser.bsky.social has discovered that mycorrhizal symbiosis is sensitive to imbalances of certain nutrients in the soil. The data come from an experiment that has been running for over 70 years. www.univie.ac.at/en/news/pres... 🧵1/3 #PlantScience

The American bombardment of Iran has been launched without explanation, without Congress, without public support. Above all it has been launched without a coherent strategy for the Iranian people, and without a plan to let them build a legitimate Iranian state. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

I enjoyed reading this paper. Many hypotheses focus on plant performance only, treat the mycorrhizal fungi as interchangeable. When should fungal identity and fitness should be front and centre in theory and experiments? doi.org/10.1093/jxb/...

MicrobeAtlas is now published in Cell. 🌐🌎🦠 Explore the paper and resource to see what large-scale microbiome data reveal about global ecological patterns: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... For a concrete application, see our recent work on “Community conservatism”: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

So, y'all have heard me going on about #causalinference in #ecology a lot. Now our big synthetic guide "Best practices for moving from correlation to causation in ecological research" is out! Led by Hannah Correia & Paul Ferraro, it's a great walk-through for all! 🌍🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧵 New paper out in @PlantPhysiology! We asked: how do trees talk to their fungal partners during ectomycorrhizal symbiosis? Turns out, tiny secreted peptides play a big role. 1/ Read the full paper here 👇 academic.oup.com/plphys/advan...

Four years have passed. We are on the right side of history. Putin is trying to take us back to the past. He cannot win on the battlefield, so his main weapon is terror against civilians. But the future will come. And it is inevitable.

People ask me how I feel on the anniversary of the full-scale invasion, when bombs began to fall on peaceful cities and columns of RU tanks marched on Kyiv. To be honest, nothing special. Just another day of war, which has become part of our lives. And destroyed everything we call normal life.

For four years, Ukraine has endured a full-scale invasion—and refuses to break. Through loss and daily hardship, Ukrainians remain united and determined, defending their sovereignty and values despite the immense human cost.

Tomorrow everyone will be asking: when will the Russo-Ukrainian war end? The right question is: what can we do to make the Russian invasion fail?