Global Change Conservation at the Missouri Botanical Garden

Please join me Thursday, November 12th for my talk for the Saint Louis Academy of Science on how conservation biologists can learn from efforts across societies and history to ensure things of value persist for long-time. – Adam

We’re very happy to serve as one of the new academic homes of Dr. Matthew Austin! Matthew is a postdoc with the Living Earth Collaborative studying how climate-induced flowering phenology shifts impact interspecific pollen transfer and the evolution of mating systems. Matthew is broadly interested in how pollination systems respond to environmental variability and graduated …
Continue reading Welcome to Matthew Austin!

Watch our talk given at the Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America on a novel technique for integrating pollen, DNA, and occurrence data to infer biogeographical trajectories! Based on our review which won “runner-up” in Ecography‘s E4 Award: Hoban, S., Dawson, A. Robinson, J., Smith, A.B., Strand, A. 2019. Inference of biogeographic history …
Continue reading Integrating different types of data to infer species’ biogeographic histories

We’re very happy to have with us Kelsey Bartlett, who is an undergraduate at George Washington University! Kelsey is georeferencing herbarium records of Ascelpias (milkweeds) of North America. Most these records are not georeferenced, or if they are, lack an estimate of uncertainty in the coordinates. As a result, about 90% of these records would …
Continue reading Welcome to Kelsey Bartlett!

We are very happy to partner with collaborators at Kansas State University and the University of Kansas to study the interdependence between the occurrence, phenotype, genotype, and rhizosphere (soil microbes) of a dominant tallgrass prairie plant, Big Bluestem (Andropogon gerardii)! On this end, we’ll be constructing highly-hierarchical Bayesian models to test functional hypotheses about each …
Continue reading Modeling GORP (genetics-occurrence-rhizosphere-phenotype)

Our paper on spatially-varying controls of pika distributions was shortlisted (of 5 papers) by The Wildlife Society! This is a triennial award with a record number of submissions, so we’re honored, regardless of the final outcome. Smith, A.B., Beever, E.A., Kessler, A.E., Johnston, A.N., Ray, C., Epps, C.W., Lanier, H.C., Klinger, R.C., Rodhouse, T.J., Varner, …
Continue reading Shortlisted on The Wildlife Society’s 2020 Wildlife Publication Awards!