Lawren Sack

Delighted to share our new preprint: "Evolution of moss leaf-like organs through variations in deeply conserved developmental principles."
Led by Ph.D. student Wenye Lin from my lab @irbv.bsky.social ,
in collab. with Yoan Coudert (ENS Lyon) and Richard Smith (JIC).
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

YouTube video by The Brian Jonestown Massacre - Topic (David Bowie I Love You) Since I Was Six

www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0vk...

Locating a control of plant and ecosystem water fluxes deep in the leaf | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Stomata In-Sight: Integrating Live Confocal Microscopy with Leaf Gas Exchange and Environmental Control The development of a tool to simultaneously measure stomatal conductance and aperture enables investigation into the role of stomatal anatomy in controllin

Stomata In-Sight: Integrating Live Confocal Microscopy with Leaf Gas Exchange and Environmental Control url: academic.oup.com/plphys/artic... @tombuckleylab.bsky.social @lawrensack.bsky.social @sheffieldpps.bsky.social @scottmcadam.bsky.social @stanfordstomata.bsky.social

Three books by W. Bond and collaborators: Fire and plants (1996), Fire in Mediterranean ecosystems (2012), and Open ecosystems (2019).

I'm very sad to say William Bond, of the University of Cape Town & Fellow of the Royal Society (@royalsociety.org ), has passed away. It is a great loss. He was an enthusiastic ecologist and a critical thinker. I learned a lot, and I still had a lot to learn from him. RIP. 😢

🧪🌎🔥🌿🌳🪴🌐 #PlantScience

I found an obituary for Steve

www.renner-wikoffchapel.com/obituary/Ste...

Wind and frost have surprisingly strong effects on global patterns in leaf cuticle thickness! Latitude, biome and taxonomy matter too. Other climate variables not so much. #trait research from international team including @lawrensack.bsky.social @westobymark.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1111/nph....

For the connoisseur of plant traits: the environmental associations of kidney-bean vs dumbbell-shaped stomatal types and their implications. Similar climate associations of stomatal size and density for grasses and non-grasses across communities. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Nice work! though I’m reluctant to needle anyone about leaf nomenclature, technically some of those angiosperm “needle leaves” are not leaves, but branchlets and phyllodes. Correcting the correction :)

Cuscuta crawling over a hapless plant. The sickly yellow threads of the parasite are wrapped around the green of the victim like a thick spider's web.

How do parasitic plants find their prey? New study shows dodder vines use touch sensitivity and light detection to hunt victims. These master grafters even attempt to parasitize metal objects.

Learn more: wp.me/pdRZhH-m3g

#Botany #PlantScience 🧪

Image of leaf fossil with insect feeding damage.

Leaf functional traits, insect #herbivory, & fungal damage on early Eocene leaf compression #fossils, Dolus Hill, Wyoming

New #AJB research by Claudia Richbourg, Lily Jackson, Kevin Chamberlain, Ian Miller, Kirk Johnson & Ellen Currano

doi.org/10.1002/ajb2... #botany #plantscience #paleobotany

We found environmental plasticity in Pinus radiata phloem under light limitation and foliar pathogenic infection, with a reduction in phloem cross-sectional area. Have a look here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... a collaboration between New Zealand and @umr-iam.bsky.social

From plant traits to fire behavior: Scaling issues in flammability studies Despite fire being one of the oldest and most important ecological disturbance processes on Earth, many aspects of fire–vegetation feedbacks are poorly understood, limiting their accurate representat...

Very excited to see this paper out!

Led by @schwilk.org, with @azhar06.bsky.social @ecologybrad.bsky.social @rachaelnolan.bsky.social @alefidelis.bsky.social @ioliverasmenor.bsky.social @dendromecon27.bsky.social @profalistairsmith.bsky.social

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

🌿 Excited to share our latest preprint!
We tracked how plasmodesmata numbers evolved across the path from C₃ → C₄ photosynthesis in Flaveria - and found a stepwise increase in cell-to-cell connectivity.
Thoughts or feedback are most welcome 😊
#PlantScience

A forest stand visualized as 3D pixels, or "voxels", extracted on a 20 by 20 m square. It is dense, but the different tree stems are easy to distinguish. Voxels are colored by height, from dark blue near the ground to light green in the top of the canopy (24 m height maximum).

The beauty of trees as lidar point clouds... 3D pixel art 🌳 🧊
Here, an oak forest stand from the North of France, with a dense understory. Voxelised with AMAPVox @umramap.bsky.social, from our terrestrial lidar scans!
@jonlen.bsky.social #EDYSAN @terschki.bsky.social

Plant trait networks: Shifting of whole phenotypes with aridity and functional richness Camila Medeiros, University of California, Los Angeles, discusses her article: Simplification of woody plant trait networks among communities along a climatic aridity gradient Motivation Plants are…

Journal of Ecology Blog for Medeiros et al. 2025!

jecologyblog.com/2025/04/08/p...

OpenAI’s new image model is great at botany

a close up of a man 's face with glasses and red hair making a funny face . Alt: Some dorky gif of John C. Reilly wearing nerd glasses and an afro while making a very surprised face.

Wait, what? I took ichthyology in college, and at no point did they explain to me that the reason early vertebrates were dominated by cartilaginous fish wasn't simplicity, but because PLANTS had not yet released enough calcium from rocks for it to become bioavailable for bone development. 🤯 🐟🌎

Balanophora is a parasitic plant that lacks chlorophyll, and steals its nutrients from tree roots. It lives beneath the rainforest floor, where once in a while, it sends up an orb that glows like the moon.

A confocal microscope photo of the cells of Radula complanata with fluorescent staining of cell walls and oil bodies.

Endophytic #bacteria discovered in oil body organelles of the #liverworts Marchantia polymorpha & Radula complanata

New #AJB research by Blair Young, Barbara Thiers, James White, & Lena Struwe

bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... #botany #plantscience

🌿The architecture of plant trait networks is more interconnected & complex in communities with higher functional richness under less arid climates 🧪 🌏

buff.ly/iok0dnU

Simplification of woody plant trait networks among communities along a climatic aridity gradient - Camila Medeiros, Santiago Trueba, Chris Henry, Leila Fletcher, Jim Lutz, Rodrigo Méndez Alonzo, Nathan Kraft, Lawren Sack - Journal of Ecology t.co/F6VWVLJ6xl

@nathanjbkraft.bsky.social

The determination of leaf size on the basis of developmental traits - Zeqing Ma, Thomas N. Buckley, Lawren Sack - New Phytologist @tombuckleylab.bsky.social

t.co/EFgmQo1qWy

it's like a 300 item gratitude list on your fridge!

A curious, modest man with an encyclopaedic knowledge. No ego but a quiet self-confidence that inspired many. No doubt many publications in the coming years will report innovative ideas that he thought of decades ago….

Rapid shifts in grassland communities driven by climate change - Nature Ecology & Evolution Plant community responses to climate change tend to be lagged in forests, but could be faster in grasslands. Here, the authors integrate long-term experimental data with >1 million occurrence recor...

Very rapid #thermophilization & #xerophilisation of grassland #plant #communities 🌾🌼🍀🌸in the California Floristic Province #CFP attributed to #climate #change ⬇️ An important study relying on both field surveys & long-term experiments ⬇️ Congrats to Kai Zhu & team

shorturl.at/3FsVm

Excited to see this paper from Mary Van Dyke out in press- she measures how rainfall manipulations alter the timing of the life cycles of California annual plants, and explore implications for species coexistence. Thanks to Sedgwick UCNRS Reserve for facilitating her research! #AJB

📣Now Free Access: The Agavoideae: an emergent model clade for CAM evolutionary biology
Get the Paper:

Eight herbarium sheets displaying various specimens of the blueberry genus, each with detailed labels and color calibration bars. The text above provides code for searching and downloading specimen metadata and images. Image credit: OUHC and BRIT herbaria.

mvh: An R tool to assemble and organize virtual #herbaria from openly available specimen images

New in #AppsPlantSci by @tvasconcelos.bsky.social & @jboyko.bsky.social

bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... @r-foundation.bsky.social @gbif.org #botany #biodiversity #iamabotanist

Here is a moment of peace for your timeline.

Little River, Great Smoky Mountains National Park