Magda Garbowski

linocut by Jitka Klimesova

#Novelty isn’t a yes/no, but a #gradient from #replication to #innovation. We should be honest about where our work sits on that gradient, instead of overselling everything as #groundbreaking
More▶️ 1url.cz/sJXel
#GoBelowground #ExFuMo #linocut @ibotcz.bsky.social @czechacademy.bsky.social

Students collecting vegetation data in the Organ Mountains

Plants with soil and roots

Students collecting plants from forest understory

Hello! I’m recruiting three graduate students (MS or PhD) to start in summer or fall 2026 . Projects are broadly focused on the ecology, restoration, and management of rangelands, deserts, and forests. Please share!

Lab website: functionalrestoration.nmsu.edu

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

An ad for a PhD position to start fall 2026 working with me at ETSU. For more info, please email at LeeBR1@etsu.edu.

A close-up picture of dimpled trout lilies active in early spring, still largely surrounded by the previous year's senesced tree leaves.

A beautiful vista of the Blue Ridge Mountains from on top of Carver's Gap on the border between North Carolina and Tennessee.

🚨 Please repost widely!🚨

I am recruiting a PhD student to join my lab next fall to work on forest and climate change ecology projects in southern Appalachia! Come join me in one of the most beautiful, biodiverse, and understudied parts of North America. Details below and happy to answer questions

Meeeee

Excited to share our paper on grassland establishment 7 yrs after native #AMF inoculation—showing AMF result in higher diversity + prairie spread into old fields—was selected Editor’s Choice by @femsjournals.bsky.social.🦠🌎
I’ll discuss next week at #SER2025 Denver ! academic.oup.com/femsle/artic...

‘The news devastated me’: Pennsylvania NPR station will be first in the US to go dark following Trump’s cuts A public media organization in a university town just a few hours northwest of Philadelphia is set to be the first in the country to go dark after the Trump administration stripped away federal funding for NPR and PBS. 

The first public media station to go dark thanks to Trump’s cutoff of federal funding to public media is a 70 year old station in Pennsylvania. https://loom.ly/IjOHdzI

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)

The GRFP lives!! (due end of October)
www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

Fully funded PhD in #Ecophysiology at UBC in Vancouver! 🍁 Possible topics include leaf physiology, thermal ecology, microclimates, scaling, tree physiology, forest ecology, and more. Start Sept 2026/Jan 2027. michaletzlab.org
Please share!
#PlantEcoPhys #Ecology #Botany #PhDposition #GradSchool

Integrating intraspecific trait variability in functional diversity: An overview of methods and a guide for ecologists Variability in traits within species (intraspecific trait variability; ITV) has attracted increased interest in functional ecology, as it can profoundly influence the detection of functional trait pa....

Hot off the press 🔥 New Ecological Monographs paper shows why, when and how to include intraspecific trait variability to enhance functional diversity research. Huge shout out to Facundo Palacio for his vision and leadership. Read here 👉 doi.org/10.1002/ecm....
#traits #functionaldiversity 📏🌐

Kayak trip with the lab in Deep Cove BC

🚨postdoc opportunity at UBC🚨 applications are now open for the Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship, due internally Oct. 15 - www.postdocs.ubc.ca/award/killam...

I can nominate 1 person and give feedback on that nominee's materials - if interested plz email me by Sept. 10 - join us!

SER in Denver?

Congrats!

Reconsidering space-for-time substitution in climate change ecology - Nature Climate Change Ecologists often leverage patterns observed across spatial climate gradients to predict the impacts of climate change (space-for-time substitution). We highlight evidence that this can be misleading n...

New paper out on the dangers of using patterns across spatial climate gradients to predict what will happen with changing climate. That includes species distribution modeling. Space-for-time substitution can be misleading in sign, not just the magnitude of effects.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Belowground persistence types relevant to severe disturbance Despite recent advances in plant trait ecology, we identified a knowledge gap in understanding how plants strategize to cope with severe and recurrent disturbances. Here, we propose a new classificati...

📢Klimešová et al. (2025) in Trends Plant Sci: Belowground persistence types relevant to severe disturbance - a new classification! ▶️ 1url.cz/FJExZ
#GoBelowground #ExFuMo #Clonality #BudBank #Resprouting #Disturbance #Storage

News from the NSF Division of Earth Sciences Informational Webinar: If US scientists want to support NSF EAR, they should continue to submit proposals. The number of proposals is an important metric for quantifying need and therefore influencing the budget

Congressionally mandated climate reports have disappeared from their federal websites | CNN The National Climate Assessments can no longer be found on their government-hosted websites.

Congressionally mandated climate reports disappeared from their federal websites. www.cnn.com/2025/07/02/c...

This is true for learning and knowledge retention in higher ed too.

Teaching individual units/topics/lectures is not as effective for learning as teaching systems of knowledge (how multiple concepts are related and help fully address a question). Brief and illustrative example in the article below.

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

People and Nature Call for Proposals: Taking stock of social-ecological restoration <em>People and Nature</em> is an international journal publishing interdisciplinary research with ecological relevance that explores the relationships between humans and nature.

Special Feature in *People and Nature*: “Halfway through the UN Decade:
taking stock of social-ecological restoration”

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal...

We welcome proposals for papers – deadline to submit abstracts is *June 30,
2025*.

We’re seeing a lot of grasses, forbs and shrubs suffering (maybe dying?) all over southern NM - the last year of drought seems to have put many species over the edge. Hopefully some things are hanging on - it would be very interesting to know which ones and why.

Dartmouth Team Launches Public Database on Soil Fungi | Faculty of Arts and Sciences

“…that's the cool thing about basic science: you just don't know what information or knowledge it will generate in the future”

Our new open mycorrhizal fungal trait database is published! Read about our science journey:

fas.dartmouth.edu/news/2025/05...

Government | Harvard University Browse the latest Government courses from Harvard University.

Another big FU from Harvard… free online courses on the US government, the US constitution, civic engagement, and more.

pll.harvard.edu/subject/gove...

Why Whistler's Summer Ski Camps Might Be Over for Good A nearly 30-year tradition has ended at Canada's largest ski resort.

Would it have killed them to mention the fact that this was due to climate change? @powcanada.bsky.social

🚨 A new rule would let career scientists like NSF/NIH program officers be replaced by political appointees

Already 14,000+ public comments, deadline is Friday

📣 Comments can be short. Courts consider them—and scientists with NSF/NIH experience are especially impactful

Speak up! shorturl.at/WKuBj

Just a few hours left to comment!

Raunkiæran shortfalls: Challenges and perspectives in trait‐based ecology Trait-based ecology, a prominent research field identifying traits linked to the distribution and interactions of organisms and their impact on ecosystem functioning, has flourished in the last three...

A nice review to add to the next steps in #TraitBaesdEcology literature - "Raunkiæran shortfalls: Challenges and perspectives in trait‐based ecology" 🌐🧪🌾https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ecm.70018

Exclusive: NSF faces radical shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions Changes seen as a response to presidential directives on what research to fund

This is an absolute disaster. If we don't stop this, they will turn NSF into a pawn of the Trump administration. There will be no research on climate, biodiversity, or anything that isn't eugenics or AI or how to more efficiently destroy the planet for profit.

This cannot be allowed to happen.