Thursday lab at the Mud Lake bog -- an exciting finale for a semester of field botany and marking the 60th anniversary of the "Woody Plants" class at @UMich @UMSEAS and #UMichEEB

My little blog is growing up 🥹 It's now The Antiquarian, a weekly newsletter exploring what we know about the past, how we learn it, and why it matters. theantiquarian.email/archive/welc...

Pleased to be hosting my earliest mentor in tropical field botany Michael Nee who will be speaking at the #MICH Herbarium tomorrow (Halloween, Friday, noon-1, Oct 31) on the "Origin of Pumpkins and Squashes". Members of the public are welcome

Many congratulations to Adriane Esquivel, Rebecca Morgan and to all our colleagues supporting Amazon forest monitoring with RAINFOR and ForestPlots.net! Our analysis of 30 years of Amazon forest change is highlighted on the cover of @natplants.nature.com. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Great pair of articles in this morning's Ann Arbor News highlighting the outstanding new leadership of the U-M Museum of Zoology and U-M Herbarium: Alison Davis Rabosky (left) and Thais Vasconcelos (right). 🍄🌿🌺🐚🪲🐟🐸🐍🐦🐿️

Amazonian hyperdominance exceeds expectations of neutral theory 🧪🌐🌾 besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

fun paper with a lot of great folks @tomacarruthers.bsky.social @willweaver.bsky.social @phylieu.bsky.social @jamesbpease.bsky.social @gbradburd.bsky.social and more nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

We are hiring a full time plant mounter to join our U-M herbarium team. The person will mount specimens from around the world and train students in the plant mounting process. Cool botanical job! careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...

Michigan's #UMMZ Reptiles and Amphibians Collections Manager position is now open. Join a great museums group and help manage the world's second largest herpetology research collection. Please share! careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...

Critical part of the President's new $100,000 charge for H1-B visas: The Administration can also offer a $100,000 discount to any person, company, or industry that it wants. Replacing rules with arbitrary discretion. Want visas? You know who to call and who to flatter.

Happy to share this commentary on our new paper in @pnas.org, led by William Farhan-Rios, exploring responses of tropical tree communities to climate warming from the Amazon to Andes Mountains 🌴 ⛰️ 🌐 An uphill struggle for tropical forest trees | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Excited to share a new paper! "Sorting of ancestral polymorphism and its impact on morphological phylogenetics and macroevolution". Part of some work I've been doing on modelling the evolution of polymorphic traits in fossil echinoderms. academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...

MSU Plant Bio is hiring a new herbarium director! Our herbarium is a wonderful resource on campus and I'm excited to have the opportunity to make it even better by bringing in a new director. Details here: plantbiology.natsci.msu.edu/job-postings...

Come join us in Corvallis! Great colleagues, a wonderful location for plant science of all types, with the added benefit of the beautiful surroundings of Oregon!

Following the fantastic #ATBC2025 meeting in Oaxaca I visited the Tree of Tule, a Montezuma cypress (Taxodium mucronatum) with the world's stoutest trunk. It's highly buttressed but even after smoothing it is thicker than the largest sequoia with a smoothed diameter of 30.8 feet. #bigtrees

Herbarium director position opening at Oregon State University ‪@osu-herbarium.bsky.social‬ Great opportunity for herbarium- and field-trained botanists at any rank. bpp.oregonstate.edu/bpp/about/op...

Heading to Oaxaca for #ATBC2025 ? Make sure you stop by our symposium for all things leaf temperature, heat tolerance, and tradeoffs across climate gradients 🌿💧🌡️

#NExTropics symposia at #ATBC2025 find out the latest from nutrient addition experiments from across the tropics

#ATBC2025 started. More than 1000 participants are in the room.

I'll be talking about hyperdominant tropical tree species at #ATBC2025 in #Oaxaca, including some recent work on Eschweilera coriacea, which despite being possibly the most common tropical tree in the world (~5 billion trees in the Amazon basin) can be hard to identify and is poorly studied.

To Whomever vandalized the Peony Garden at the Nichols Arboretum at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor last night: There is so little beauty in our world right now. You are making the world a more cruel and ugly place. You are not helping. www.instagram.com/reel/DKXFSz5...

This is an absolute disaster. If we don't stop this, they will turn NSF into a pawn of the Trump administration. There will be no research on climate, biodiversity, or anything that isn't eugenics or AI or how to more efficiently destroy the planet for profit. This cannot be allowed to happen.

The legendary USGS Bee Lab is being shut down. The 2026 budget proposal defunds the Ecosystem Mission Area, which supported the lab. If their science helped your work, there’s still time to make your voice heard. Read below. (1/4) 🧪 #pollinators #Pollinators #USGS #Entomology #Hymenoptera 🪲🪳

I continue to be awed by the Blanding's turtles at the ES George reserve #ESGR. A U-M grad student first tagged them in 1953. At 95 years old, our oldest marked female shows no sign of aging and reproduces with as much vigor as a 20 yr old! lsa.umich.edu/herbarium/ne...

Spring newsletter from the U-M Museum of Zoology #UMMZ and Herbarium #MICH (EEB museums) with a story from the ES George Reserve #ESGR on our elderly Blanding's turtles lsa.umich.edu/eeb/alumni-f...

🌳⚠️Out now in Systematic Biology⚠️🌳 We find rampant reticulation in Inga, the blindingly rapid Amazonian tree radiation! ⚡ BONUS: We also find introgression and selection on genes underlying chemical defences, helping Ingas resist relentless insect herbivory 🐛☠️🌳 academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

Fully on board with dems running for office promising to reinstate fired federal employees and jail this administration’s various criminals, but let’s go ahead and add “we will seize by eminent domain any national parkland sold to developers”

The tropical timber tree angelique, Dicorynia guianensis, is locally adapted to the east-west rainfall gradient in French Guiana! Congrats to Julien Bonnier for publishing this PhD chapter in Molecular Ecology! doi.org/10.1111/mec....

Measles is our most infectious disease, can pass to others even 2 hours after a victim passes through a room, and kills 1 to 3 people per 1000--mostly young, unvaccinated children. Please get your children vaccinated.

In light of the recent visa withdrawals, here is a PDF with advice for international students at UCLA. I’m so sorry to have to share this. drive.google.com/file/d/1x8_z...

Check out our new paper led by the amazing @benkuhnhaeuser.bsky.social in @science.org, exploring how the extraordinary diversity of Asian rattan palms was assembled 🌴

INPA procura candidato(a) para pós-doutorado no Projeto “Integrando a hidrologia do solo e características hidráulicas para entender os riscos de mortalidade às secas das árvores gigantes” com o projeto “GIGANTE” (www.caryinstitute.org/science/rese...). @treeco-db.bsky.social @evangora.bsky.social

The latest issue of @lizneeley.bsky.social’s essential weekly newsletter on the continuing attacks on science & higher-ed, and living through these times: buttondown.com/liminalcreat...

⚡⚡Did you know that some trees WANT to be struck by lightning?⚡⚡ Well, trees don't "want" anything, but if they did, then Dipteryx oleifera trees would want to be struck by lightning. Just published yesterday (tinyurl.com/ltbnft) and described in this video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwX_... (1/5)

Does this sound like your America? Men dressed in unlabeled black hoodies grab a Tufts University student off the street and into a Louisiana jail for writing an opinion piece opposing Israel's war in Gaza. www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/...

📢 Job Alert! 🌳 Looking for a 2-yr postdoc (ext. up to 3 yrs) to join me at U. of Gothenburg to study links between environmental drivers, tree conditions (e.g., #treedamage), and physiological processes leading to #tropical #treemortality. Apply by: April 17th Details below

The botanist Al Gentry changed tropical ecology and helped create the global science of today. This new article celebrates Gentry's unique innovations, achievements and lasting influence, more than 30 years after his untimely death. rainfor.org/wp-content/u... annals.mobot.org/index.php/an...

Tropical forests are not all the same: they show many shades of geographical variation. Our new paper in Nature led by @jeaggu.bsky.social combines field and satellite data to make a first map the canopy functional traits of the world’s tropical forests: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

American science and medicine has been thrown into chaos and uncertainty over the past week. Here are some stories to get up to speed. 1/12

Join the Missouri Botanical Garden! If you are interested in conservation, restoration, or plant systematics in Latin America, this is a great opportunity to work at an institution driven by a passion for describing and conserving plants. One more week to apply! jobs.dayforcehcm.com/en-US/mbg/CA...

Congratulations, and i want to note that the sign orginated at the University of South Carolina's A.C. Moore Herbarium, which has the url herbarium.org!

Thais Vasconcelos @tvasconcelos.bsky.social will be the new Director of the Univ. of Michigan Herbarium starting in January -- and the first woman to fill this role in our herbarium's >100 year history. Congrats Thais!

Finally catching up with the hard copy of @andrewlhipp.bsky.social's latest. Beautiful book! A meditation on oaks--and what they tell us about ecosystems, evolution, and Earth history.

finally read the small print in this poster-- #botany power!

Some exciting new research on the flowering plant order Ericales based on genomic sampling of 2870 species, mostly from #herbarium specimens. open access nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Excited to read Robin Wall Kimmerer's new book! 🌍🌿🍒🧍‍♀️ The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World... www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Se...

Osculate is a literary word meaning to kiss. Inosculate is when two trees accidentally become grafted to each other and exchange sap. Our #WoodyPlants class found this pair of osculating maple trees near Milan— note the smaller tree is so well fed that its trunk is larger above the graft. #botany

Some new research "Evidence for a Miocene pulse of diversification of the tropical American clade of the Brazil nut family (Lecythidaceae)" It is not open access but this link should get you a gift copy www.tandfonline.com/eprint/PVMZE...

A bit disconcerting when one of the world's largest moth species is attracted to your headlamp! Found this beautiful Hercules Moth in far north Queensland. #wildoz #wildlife #nature #biodiversity #insects