Thanks Drew! 🙂

So cool to see our work highlighted here! Thanks @botany.one ! And, re: the question “were you one of the observers in our dataset,” besides in the paper supplement, there’s a full list of them here: github.com/pmckenz1/mon...

The United States National Herbarium is seeking a Lead Collections Manager! For complete requirements and application procedures, please visit USAJOBS (www.usajobs.gov/job/864499200). Applications and all supporting documentation must be received online by 1 May 2026.

We had fun partnering with the Oregon Stater magazine to share a little bit about Mycology at OSU!! Each fall our Mycology class has a fantastic time collecting and identifying fungi on our field trips 🍄 🍄 🍄

Herbarium Sheets Are Holding Secrets Their Makers Never Intended When you mount a plant on a sheet, you capture more than botany. A new paper reveals the unexpected historical treasures hiding in herbaria, and why closing them is a mistake.

Herbarium Sheets Are Holding Secrets Their Makers Never Intended
www.botany.one/herbarium-sh...

When you mount a plant on a sheet, you capture more than botany. A new paper reveals the unexpected historical treasures hiding in herbaria, and why closing them is a mistake.
#Botany #PlantScience

My PhD paper on my beloved cycads and beetles on the cover of Science!!!

Check out how we studied thermal infrared as a pollination signal, from molecular mechanisms to the wonders of behavior...

science.org/doi/10.1126/...

this looks awesome, congrats! looking forward to reading it!

Our greenhouse lights/fixtures need to be replaced. What light systems are newer university/commercial greenhouses using these days? Are we shifting to LEDs and away from high pressure sodium?

definitely overlap! Main difference right now is that pedigraph-sim explicitly tracks meiosis, homologs, ancestry segments, making the path from crossing over to local genealogies super easy to inspect. In future I also want it to support ploidy variation and more crossover models

Incredible. But will save that name for the version with arms and legs 🤖

Didn’t think that one rolled off the tongue quite as well 😂

It works at super small scales - e.g. 10 diploids for 100 gens. This is the first pass, so still a bit clunky and feature-limited. I’m planning to incorporate polyploidy, interference, other map functions, etc and eventually improve performance

To me it pretty often feels tough to link patterns in coalescent-with-recombination tree sequences back to the mechanistic/biological process of crossing over. Made pedigraph-sim specifically to help make the relationship between meiotic recombination and the “tree sequence” super transparent

GitHub - pmckenz1/pedigraph-sim: Combining explicit pedigrees with crossover simulations with ARG tracking. Combining explicit pedigrees with crossover simulations with ARG tracking. - pmckenz1/pedigraph-sim

Spun off a lightweight python package “pedigraph-sim” for simulating meiosis on arbitrary pedigrees. It tracks how crossing over produces segments of local ancestry and contains convenience functions like exporting the tree sequence to tskit for analysis: github.com/pmckenz1/ped...

Only two more days to submit abstracts for the Bay Area PopGen conference! Registration still open for the low low price of $0. bapg-conference.github.io

Introgression and parental conflict shape repeated occurrences of postzygotic isolation in Mimulus Postzygotic reproductive isolation is often thought to accumulate as a byproduct of neutral divergence. Yet it frequently evolves rapidly, in line wit…

I am SO THRILLED to share our first fully-lab lab paper!!!!!! Led by @hybridzones.bsky.social & @hagarsoliman.bsky.social, w/ a major assist from @pfschwarz.bsky.social!!!!!!!!!!!!! Read more below, if you're curious (you should be- it's AWESOME!!!!!!!)

link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

a heatmap of average flowering time in North America, with earlier days of year colored in blues and later days as red or orange. General pattern of blue to red from south to north, but with a vertical band of red in western Mexico

map of overall (radial) avg flowering day across all species, made using PhenoVision-labeled iNat data. Trying to figure out if I should be surprised by this or questioning my data analysis... is the late flowering in the west Sierra Madre well known? Fwiw, corresponds to rainy season there.

email screenshot with subject line "interesting Cheilyctis observation" and timestamp 11:02pm. Message begins "Hi y'all, Keeping with my tradition of oversharing random iNaturalist observations, thought y'all might find this one interesting:"

this one started from my living room with an 11:02pm email to colleagues of basically “check out this weird observation” and turned into a super rewarding international collaboration

iNaturalist-facilitated rediscovery of Monarda mexicana (Lamiaceae) in high-elevation habitats of Durango, Mexico | Phytotaxa

the "lost" species Monarda mexicana is still out there! Known from just 2 historical collections (most recent from the 1950s). Imagine my joy in stumbling on a picture of it on @inaturalist.bsky.social !!! We've now documented the first known modern populations and revived the species name:

Me in the LH Bailey Herbarium at Cornell, with a bunch of Monarda specimens out on the table

My kid looking out the car window at a bunch of gulls on compost piles

One of the gulls we came for, in the center of the picture: glaucous-winged gull

Four people looking out (birding) at a snowy field

Successful Ithaca visit looks like 1) time in the Bailey Herbarium, and 2) birding the compost piles

congrats!!!

Can't imagine what it'd be like to deal with TGCT as a child. Proud to be involved in this work characterizing the pediatric patient experience.

Salary to living wage plot with only 4 programs falling aprove the 1:1 line and paying a living wage.

Happy recruitment/interview season for PhD students! Recruiting students in ecology & evolutionary biology? Make sure your department's stipend is accurate in our database: rhettrautsaw.app/shiny/Biolog...

Hooray! Check out this special issue for some fantastic new work on flower color!

‘Dispersification’ of Agalinis (Orobanchaceae) Into South America Is Associated With Hummingbird Pollination and Perennial Life-History Shifts
@pedropezzi.bsky.social @soltislab.bsky.social
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

New preprint is up!

Not going spoil the results for you 🤓 but we looked at some “bird” vs “bee”-pollinated Penstemon hybrid zones and came away with some pretty unexpected results!

Join @amsocplanttaxon.bsky.social for the first webinar in our 2026 series: "Taxonomy: What is it good for?"

Free to all! Join us to hear @sandyknapp.bsky.social's "Of course taxonomy matters! The story of the mega-genus Solanum (Solanaceae)"

Pls register & share:

us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

“Natural History, Crowdsourced,” an article in Arnoldia by Patrick McKenzie. The article begins with an image of a ruby-throated hummingbird visiting Lobelia cardinalis.

Quiet hours in the sun, meditating with the bugs, plants, and birds, are my inspiration as an evolutionary biologist.

I wrote in the most recent issue of Arnoldia about using @inaturalist.bsky.social and, more generally, about the continuing role of natural history in motivating questions in evo bio + my excitement about community science for unlocking new scales of analysis: arboretum.harvard.edu/arnoldia-sto...

Come stop by P40 and chat with me about an east coast Penstemon species - Penstemon canescens! I'll be presenting the early stages of my masters thesis and would love to bounce morphology research methods off people!

Weird wet weather has Joshua trees flowering early — or late? Help the Yoder Lab map this “bonus bloom” to understand why A flowering tree in Yucca Valley, CA, observed by iNaturalist contributor wanderingmojave on December 9. A tree with lots of flowers in Tehachapi, CA, observed by iNaturalist contributor tina9294 o…

I started getting reports of an unseasonal Joshua tree bloom in the last few weeks, and looking over records on @inaturalist.bsky.social it's pretty widespread! So we're putting out the call for folks to record this "bonus bloom" and help us study it 🌿

lab.jbyoder.org/2025/12/10/w...