Beyond climate? Factors determining fruiting and flowering phenology across a genus over 117 years

Kelsey is very happy to have published her article on flowering and fruiting phenology across the entire genus of Leavenworthia, a taxon with some very highly-endemic species! Moreover, her research has been highlighted by the American Journal of Botany, and featured in a mini-documentary and a press release by Washington University in Saint Louis! To …
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The decimation of Madagascar’s rainforest habitat

It is honestly with sadness that I announce our new publication on the fate of Madagscar’s rainforest habitat in Nature Climate Change. Modeling deforestation assuming the lowest rate of deforestation across the period 2000-2014, I could only get the rainforest to last to the 2070s… and the highest rate of loss occurred in 2018, outside …
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NSF Advances in Biological Informatics

Awesome news! We were just informed that the National Science Foundation will fund our proposal to use pollen, genetic, and distributional data to estimate the spatial dynamics of how trees migrated poleward after the last glacial maximum.  This is a collaborative project with Sean Hoban (Morton Arboretum), Andria Dawson (Mount Royal University), John Robinson (Michigan …
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Phenotypic distribution modeling

Our latest paper in Global Change Biology on modeling intraspecific phenotypic variation has gotten great press!  Combined, the news outlets covering our research reach ~78 million people and included The San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, US News and World Report, The Topeka Capital Journal, The Manhattan Mercury, and numerous other regional newspapers, radio stations (e.g., KWMU 90.7), TV …
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Climate paths and climate change communication

How can we communicate global warming to local audiences (= everybody who lives in a place)? Recently I made a poster showing the locations that climatically currently resemble the future climate of St. Louis. But how did I know where to locate the “future” St. Louis climatically?  By running species distribution models in “reverse”.  First, I …
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