Matt Koski

Text: The Evolution Exchange, a monthly conversation series from the Society for the Study of Evolution. Outlines of cartoon heads with speech bubbles.

💬 In the second installment of The Evolution Exchange, retired NSF Program Officer Dr. Sam Scheiner returns to discuss how to craft a successful research proposal. Watch or read the transcript here: www.evolutionsociety.org/the-evolutio...

successful start to fields season! scored phenology for 5885 phacelia individuals and met some nice cats.

ICE plans to spend $38.3 billion turning warehouses into detention centers ICE plans to spend $38.3 billion converting warehouses into detention centers, according to planning documents, more than the annual budgets of 22 states.

Imagine if even a fraction of what this administration plans to spend on cages went toward housing people.

Friedman Lab Visit the post for more.

Are you anywhere in the world (other than Canada) and want to do a PhD in my lab in Canada at Queen's University? We have a prestigious scholarship for 3-years of PhD funding. Get in touch, applications due early February. Must love plants and evolution!
friedmanlab.ca

Special Issue: Paradigm Shifts in Flower Color: American Journal of Botany: Vol 113, No 1 Click on the title to browse this issue

Check out AJB's special issue "Paradigm shifts in flower color" a bunch of cool papers on flower coloration with a focus on non-pollinator drivers of color variation 🌸🌼🌺https://bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15372197/2026/113/1

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!

🧪🐠 I am hiring a postdoc! Work will be on patterns of biodiversity across phylogenetic scales using teleost fishes as a model. Apply by end of Jan 2026 for full consideration apply.interfolio.com/179070 I encourage folks to reach out with any questions. Please Share!

Treeline shifts were better explained by the cold tolerance index based on the species' thermal niche.

Faster boundary shifts near the cold limit of species' niche

Zheng et al.

nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Thanks Martijn!

"Her wit was as sharp as her convictions, and her honesty was refreshing and rare."

A wonderfully written (by @gbaucom.bsky.social) obituary for my grad school friend and Auburn University Prof. Vanessa Koelling, who passed away last week.

www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/m...

I'm hiring a full time fixed-term 1yr lab tech to assist with field and greenhouse projects related to floral evolution and plant reproductive ecology. Please share! Ideal start date early 2026.

jobs.clemson.edu/psc/ps/JOBS/...

Overcoming barriers that limit the impact of ecological research Ecology and conservation researchers have diverse goals that often include both personal career aspirations and desires to enhance the well-being of the natural world and its inhabitants. Perception ....

Why do so many ecologists share common feelings of disconnection between their research goals and real-world impact? 🌍

Our new article in #FE&E explores the constraints that limit ecological research and how we can mitigate them. 👇

esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Temperature‐dependent pollinator‐mediated selection on floral thermoregulation The thermal environment is one of the most pervasive agents of selection. Most plants cannot choose their microclimate, so understanding how they cope with thermal variability is of critical concern...

phenotypic selection on flower thermoregulation depends on air temperature. huuuuge effort by many lab members past and present.

nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Bumping this up one last time. I'm looking to hire graduate student(s) to work on an NSF-funded project to study elevational range shifts among dragonflies here in Colorado. @cudenverclas.bsky.social 🧪🌍🐙

Applications will be considered until Nov 1. See post below for more details

@ecologicalsociety.bsky.social

Have a colleague, postdoc, or student that published an outstanding paper in the field of plant ecology in the last 5 years? Nominate them for the ESA Cooper award. Self-noms welcome! NOV 16 deadline.

please retweet or whatever its called now

esa-awards.secure-platform.com/a/page/esa-a...

@omgitsmejenny.bsky.social talks about her masters thesis on the effects of flower temperature on pollinator visitation and behavior

Showy dragonflies are being driven extinct by warming and wildfire Nature Climate Change - The authors use 1,603 estimates of local extinctions from 1980 to 2021 to show that dragonfly species with wing ornamentation have disproportionately gone extinct and lost...

new paper from my lab @cudenverclas.bsky.social in @natclimate.nature.com, led by @sarahnalley.bsky.social!

Dragonflies with dark mating ornaments on their wings are disappearing from parts of the United States that have had more warming and wildfire over the last 40 years 🧪🌍🐙

rdcu.be/eFm7e

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza next to a windmill whose sails are a large phylogeny, subtitled Escudero Lab

Marcial Escudero’s lab has a nice logo 😁
https://marcialescuderolab.weebly.com/
#ESEB2025

Blushing haha. thanks! And yes- a big effort be a lot of great folks in the lab over the years

Now our first invited speaker @mattkoski.bsky.social tells us about flower thermal performance local adaptation for gametogenesis (complete with cheerleader moves to show us thermoregulating petals)

Big news! We are recruiting a postdoc to work on tomatillo evolution: jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDeta.... The clade containing tomatillos and its allies (ca 300 spp) has evolved lantern fruits at least 25 times - we want to know why! Join us @rociodeanna.bsky.social & @caschenck-bio.bsky.social

Hiking in the Pyrenees for a few days before #eseb2025 to commemorate my first official day as associate Professor

Jen’s awesome thesis work on flower temperature and pollination out in @funecology.bsky.social !! @omgitsmejenny.bsky.social

Fig.3 Micropatterns on the petal surface are created by variation in epidermal cell pigment, shape and cuticle textures.

✨ Paper spotlight ✨

(🧵 1/3) Evolution of petal patterning: blooming floral diversity at the microscale
nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Floral shape and color impact heat accumulation and thermal stability of the floral microenvironment in a subalpine meadow Premise The floral thermal microenvironment impacts plant reproduction through its effects on gametophyte performance and plant–pollinator interactions. Color and shape are axes of floral variation ...

bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Figure 1: Steps with representative photographs of the flower color phenotyping pipeline. A) We exported all research-grade iNaturalist observations of Monarda fistulosa from GBIF. B) We used GPT-4o to classify each image as to whether it contained a flower. C) We trained a Roboflow semantic segmentation model on a subset of images and applied the trained model to extract “flower” pixels from each image in the dataset. D) We calculated the geometric median of each set of extracted pixels to represent the flower color phenotype from each image, and we paired this phenotype with the observation’s iNaturalist metadata for spatial analysis.

Figure 2: Spatial summary of Monarda fistulosa flower colors across North America. A) Map of the color of M. fistulosa flowers. Each square is a 200km x 200km cell with the color corresponding to the average median CIELAB color value of each observation in the cell. The dotted line denotes -100° longitude, separating eastern and western regions of the range. B) Boxplots summarizing LCh color components west and east of -100° longitude, with each box showing the median and interquartile range, and with the color of each box reflecting the geometric median CIELAB value from west and east, respectively.

New preprint out today! A really fun collaboration with @shchurch.bsky.social and Robin Hopkins in which we study flower color variation in Monarda fistulosa using iNaturalist data. We process >40,000 images and use them to phenotype flower color in >16,000 observations: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Unravelling the Effects of Ecology and Evolutionary History in the Phenotypic Convergence of Fishes Abstract. Understanding the ecological drivers and limitations of adaptive convergence is a fundamental challenge. Here, we explore how adaptive convergenc

Super excited to share our new paper investigating convergence across planktivorous fishes and assessing the impact of ancestry and light environment led by Dr Jen Hodge @fishncurious.bsky.social and including most members of the lab past and present academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

The news is out! The CapituLab is moving to Clemson University this fall 🌻 We are excited to get there and get started!

I am so excited about this upcoming publication about the Bees of Pennsylvania! 🐝 Stay tuned; we will have a page online where you can purchase this book in July! @nashturley.bsky.social @napoleonicento.bsky.social @stephanidae.bsky.social