Matt’s findings that climate change has induced not only a change in phenology but also a change in reproductive strategy from more to less selfing in the common blue violet, Viola sororia, has been featured by not only USA Today, but also St. Louis’s FOX2 TV and Washington University in Saint Louis’s Climate Change Program! …
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Category:global change
Issues in global change conservation
Collaboration across decades: Matt Austin’s project on wildflower phenology
Matt’s project on examining the evolutionary implications of changes in wildflower phenology was nicely reported on the Newsroom blog of Washington University in Saint Louis!
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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A Perfect Storm of Threats
Just out: a new analysis by Haydee Hernández-Yáñez and 7 other students at the University of Missouri-Saint Louis and myself on the threats that affect all known rare plants of the US! This is a reprise of the analysis by David Wilcove and colleagues from 1998. We already got coverage on NPR and Inside Science! …
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Cliffhanger
I think I was on a long-haul flight across the Pacific when I succumbed to jet-lag induced doldrums and watched Sylvester Stallone’s Cliffhanger which stars him (surprise) as a mountaineer who gets himself out of a dastardly plot by climbing around and flexing his muscles. So if there’s a Rocky of the rare plant world, …
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