Emma Steigerwald

My undergrad mentee, Dorian Scheim, rocked their first conference at #Botany2025!

If you're interested in temporal sampling using herbaria, asters, or how floret counts change over time and environments, there's still time to check out their poster at P109!

If you're at #Botany2025, I'd love to see you at 5pm in the popgen session, where I'll be sharing on landscape genomics across the tiny, fragmentary range of the Gaviota tarplant!

So we've got rapid differentiation occurring in the context of distinct biological assemblages, in a system where this natural habitat fragmentation has occurred repeatedly. Our work supports the idea that landscapes characterized by cyclical fragmentation could be 'crucibles of evolution' 🌋🪲🕷️(3/X)

Kīpuka hosted unique communities, more impacted by non-native species, whose richness at species- & haplotype-equivalent scales increased with their size. Kīpuka were also associated with faster turnover at both scales, though we also compare the idiosyncratic responses of different taxa (2/3)

Proud to share our new article on how lava flows reshape Hawaiian arthropod communities at species- & haplotype-equivalent scales!
We studied kīpuka—forest patches isolated by lava flows--with bulk arthropod samples & metabarcoding.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... (1/3)

Hundreds of Thousands Will Die The writer, surgeon, and former U.S.A.I.D. administrator Atul Gawande on the Trump Administration’s decimation of foreign aid and the consequences around the world.

What happens when you do surgery with a chainsaw www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-...

‘Illegal, backwards and wrong’: Hundreds decry federal funding cuts, firings in Stand Up for Science rallies Climate change, managing fisheries, cancer research and training young scientists were just some of the major issues that protestors raised in two of the more than 30 protests around the country on Fr...

Grateful for our Stand up for Science Rally at UCSC today!
"They want to raid the pockets of universities, labs, hospitals and agencies across the country.... if they are successful, people will suffer, and our economy, our health and our environment will also suffer."
tinyurl.com/3b2yts7y

Wow, congratulations, Vince! That should be such fulfilling work!

Removal of National Environmental Policy Act Implementing Regulations This interim final rule removes the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) regulations implementing the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) from the Code of Federal Regulations. In addition, this...

Leave PUBLIC COMMENT opposing the final interim rule that will strip NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) regulations: shorturl.at/6zdG1
🌍🌍🌍
NEPA requires federal agencies to assess the environmental, cultural, and historical impacts of proposed projects before they are approved.

Celebrating 100,000 Modeled Taxa with the iNaturalist Open Range Map Dataset A Major Milestone for Biodiversity Mapping We passed a major milestone with today’s update to iNaturalist’s Computer Vision and Geomodel—100,000 modeled taxa! To mark this achievement, we’re excited t...

Ever since Norman Myers came up with biodiversity hotspots I’ve found the idea intriguing-but was a little disappointed to find it was largely based on plant distribution. Today you can look at @inaturalist global biodiversity map of 100,000 species 👏👏👏👏👏 www.inaturalist.org/posts/106918...

Quote post with a picture you took in a National Park.

Yosemite with my parents and partner this winter.

A Lady Professor with brown hair and glasses, wearing a scarf in red, green, yellow, & black, a gift from an incredible lactation consultant, sitting in in front of cactus.

I escaped poverty because I am a scientist.

And I am a scientist because of the National Science Foundation.

A 🧵:

When you don't normally write the word, so suddenly realize you have forgotten the actual spelling of 'angsd' 😭🤡

WATCH: “This is what happens when the world’s biggest aid donor suddenly stops sending money… not a single doctor for this community of more than 30,000 people.”

After Trump’s cuts, Myanmar-Thailand refugees unable to access critical care.

Where did billions in climate and infrastructure funding go? Search our map by ZIP code. From clean energy projects to bridges, this interactive tool shows what projects lawmakers announced in your neighborhood.

A new tool shows you how much federal funding tied to the Inflation Reduction Act and Biden-era infrastructure legislation is being spent in any given zip code. There's more than $1B within 10 miles of me, from battery manufacturing to cybersecurity. What's in your area?
grist.org/accountabili...

Portuguese editorial cartoonist Zez Vaz reaches back to Tiananmen Square to call on American defiance.

Caecilians maintain a functional long-wavelength-sensitive cone opsin gene despite signatures of relaxed selection and more than 200 million years of fossoriality Visual systems are tuned to animals’ ecologies, evolving in response to specific light environments and visual needs. Ecological transitions to fossorial lifestyles impose strong selective pressures f...

We have a new pre-print out describing a functional long-wavelength cone opsin gene in caecilians. Check out the preprint here: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

The explainer thread is here (sorry!): x.com/majonavarret...

🐸🌿🧪

Great piece by @antonsrkn.bsky.social delving into all the nuance surrounding how the L.A. fires might impact wildlife. Happy to have been part of it, check it out!

Made my first calls to Congress for the new week with @indivisible.org's current list of requested actions against the ongoing constitutional crisis, which covers options for representatives and senators of both parties

indivisible.org/coup

The Trump NIH is banning hires of new students and postdocs. This is devastating for NIH research and will result in a lost generation of researchers at the institution.

Heard from a applicant today: "A lot of people are banking their entire careers on the [NIH student programs]..."
#NIH 🧪
1/

COVID vaccination saved more than 5,000 US lives in 7 months in 2023-24, CDC estimates

NEW modeling study on covid vaccination:

-More than 68,000 people averted hospitalization with covid in 2023-24 bc they have been vaccinated
-More than 13,000 averted intensive care bc they were vaccinated
-Roughly 5,000 lives were saved bc of covid vaccines

www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/cov...

New @erc.europa.eu funded #ConvergeAnt paper on phylogenetics and transcriptomics of chitinase gene repertoires in convergent ant-eating mammals finally published in @genomebiolevol.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1093/gbe/...

Watch a professor explain the evolutionary war that gave us caffeine - Berkeley News Through the eyes of UC Berkeley professor Noah Whiteman, the food we love is the product of four billion years of coevolution between plants and animals.

Coevolution in 101 seconds! news.berkeley.edu/2025/02/06/w...

Decision tree that has been sent to Program Officers at NSF

Decision tree that has been sent to Program Officers at NSF

It has been brought to my attention that my article has been censored to exclude certain terms:

asm.org/Articles/202...

web.archive.org/web/20250114...

#MicroSky

Here is the guidance in full. The wording is very broad. This should help a lot of organizations and people.

The US gained its international leadership in science (& economic benefits of that leadership) starting in the 1930s when Nazi germany drove away its leading scientists.
The US can lose that leadership in much the same way, which will take many years to recover from.

Oppose RFK
Save NIH/NSF/CDC

13 state Attorneys General put out a joint statement this week vigorously defending DEIA programs and calling the EOs offensive, discriminatory, and illegal. They're Democrats. Some Dems absolutely need their spines stiffened. But some are actually fighting too www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-re...

Hey if anyone is considering backing up any datasets for some reason today, the Open Science Framework has free storage up to 5G/private repository, and up to 50G/public repository.

(The OSF is run by a 501c3 (Center for Open Science), so if you do this you might also consider making a donation.)