Alayna Mead

Bright green, newly formed leaves growing from a poplar stem in a field.

Hi #ESA2025! I'll be talking about phenology in a poplar hybrid zone at 3:45 this afternoon in the "Beyond Budburst–Connecting Phenological Transitions Among Tissues and Times in Woody Plants" session. Excited to hear some phenology talks!

I am thrilled to share this paper outlining some ideas I’ve been thinking about for a little while on a simple but powerful approach for predicting risk of inbreeding depression from long runs of homozygosity and non-ROH heterozygosity. 1/n @klohmueller.bsky.social doi.org/10.1016/j.tr...

Very excited to have our study come out looking at multiple plant mosaic hybrid zones and their implications for hybrids to act as "sutures" of species ranges. We use genomic data to project shifts into future climates and discuss impacts on conservation/management.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Super sad to be missing out on #Botany2025, but Hamilton Lab is represented by @sammymuraguri.bsky.social - be sure to drop by his poster to learn about the genomic architecture of adaptive introgression across repeated contact zones between two sister Poplar species #PopUpPoplars

Winter is great, thunderstorms in spring are great, leaves changing colors in fall is great. Californians insulate themselves from the beauty and changes of the seasons in search of a mythical “perfect weather”. It’s perverse Utopianism and a weakness of the spirit

One week to go!!! So excited to host our colleagues next week in the Happy Valley of Pennsylvania! Over 150 registrants from around the world!! If you’re interested in coming but unable to join in person - email me to learn about virtual options forestgeneticsconference2025.com #forestgenetics2025

Based on some quick math, this alone could fund the NSF Plant Genome Research Program for ~4 years; the NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology, which was totally axed in the NSF budget request, for ~9 years; and ~ half the total NSF GRFP budget

ADMIXTURE analysis. Admixture plots for (a) K = 5 and (b) K = 6, partitioned by species (leaf silhouettes; from left to right, Q. macrocarpa, Q. alba, Q. bicolor, Q. stellata, Q. muehlenbergii). (c) Plot of cross-validation error as a function of K, from K = 2 to K = 8. (d) Heatmap of pairwise FST scores between ancestral clusters inferred in the K = 6 ADMIXTURE run.

Our new study out in Molecular Ecology, led by 3 early-career scientists, uses hyb-seq on rangewide field collections to document introgression, species differentiation, and phylogeograhy of bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa) & relatives. Great work by a large team over many yrs!

doi.org/10.1111/mec....

Progressive Pride Flag made in 2022 by Dr. Justin Luong from photos taken by Justin Luong of California Native Plants. #Pride #Pride2025 ##CaliforniaNativePlants

Happy Pride from California Native Plants!

Variation in responses to temperature across admixed genotypes of Populus trichocarpa x P. balsamifera predict geographic shifts in regions where hybrids are favored In a rapidly changing environment, predicting changes in the growth and survival of local populations can inform conservation and management. Plastic responses vary as a result of genetic differentiat...

Super excited for the first manuscript #NSFFunded led by the very talented
@alaynamead.bsky.social
from our #PopUpPoplar common gardens spanning 17 environments across the US that examined fitness variation and predicted range shifts for hybrids to new environments www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Constantia, Lassen County, CA
🗺39.9228, -120.0034 🧭216° ⛰5604 ft
https://ops.alertcalifornia.org/cam-console/1635

A map of the US showing how most people aren't talking about climate change. Source: https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/ycom-us/ The palette goes from dark red (100% of people in that state hear about climate change weekly), to a transition between pale orange and pale blue at 50%, to dark blue (people never hear climate change messages). In the U.S. no state is above 50%, so states with more frequent climate communication (Colorado, Massachusetts) are lighter than states with less (Oklahoma, West Virginia). This visually de-emphasizes those states.

One thing I’ve noticed as people move away from the rainbow palette is more use of divergent palettes for sequential data. That’s not *always* a bad idea, but often is. This example inadvertently de-emphasizes states (Colorado) where people hear about climate change more frequently.

#dataviz 📊

Excited by new #NSFFunded research from #PopUpPoplars led by @michellezavala.bsky.social that shows the importance of considering cytonuclear interactions to plant function

The role of cytonuclear interactions to plant adaptation across a Populus hybrid zone www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The PLANTS program (funded by NSF) at @botsocamerica.bsky.social was a cornerstone of the conference each year, bringing together new-to-science scholars with more experienced mentors. It helped provide community, support, and connection to new scientists.

The grant was terminated last week.

Replicate geographic transects across a hybrid zone reveal parallelism and differences in the genetic architecture of reproductive isolation Abstract. Determining the genetic architecture of traits involved in adaptation and speciation is one of the key components of understanding the evolutiona

happy to see our study on genetic parallelism of reproductive isolation in chickadee hybrid zones out in @evolletters.bsky.social—great work led by Georgy Semenov & Scott Taylor: doi.org/10.1093/evle...

With all the chaos, it was good to help put some trees in the ground today! 🌿💚

Digital painting of a sunset sky, a gradient of a deep blue to a bright orange, with long wisps of red and pink clouds sprawled across the sky.

We report: the first few days of May happened like a drawn-out sigh, a spill of warmth and light. Spring is now rolling out at full speed, and we remember now how hungry green can be, crawling onto pavements and walls and trees. The sunset seems a weak attempt at stopping it.

Upset about federal funding cuts in the US? Want some ideas of what to do? I wrote a long-ish blog post about it here
ecoevoevoeco.blogspot.com
summarizing things I learned meeting with Senate & House aides this week with the @aibsbiology.bsky.social Congressional Visits Day event.

NEW: We (mostly @noamross.net) launched a website to shine a brighter light on terminated NIH and NSF grants.

grant-watch.us

It links to our NIH & NSF trackers, grant info submission forms, and other info. We'll also add new analyses soon.

Check it out and let us know what else you'd like to see.

My NSF PRFB on the genetics of female polymorphism in hummingbirds was terminated yesterday.

I don't have much to say, I'm just sad. We've discovered so much, and could have gone so much further.

If anyone else is in the same boat, esp postdocs, please reach out, it would be good to connect.

🧪 Our Terminated NSF Grant Tracker is live 🧪

🔴 114 NSF grants listed so far

🔴 Cancelled grants focused on

→ Training scientists
→ Misinformation
→ AI
→ Climate change

Credit to @noamross.net for all the work to build this & to all PIs who submitted their info.

Link: airtable.com/appGKlSVeXni...

🧪 Tip: You have the right to contest a grant termination, even though NSF says you don't. 🧵

On Friday, NSF terminated 402 grants (per Musk's DOGE).

The notification letters had one of the most egregious violations of fed regulations I've seen so far in these cases:

"not subject to appeal"

I got an email yesterday afternoon that my NSF SPRF Postdoctoral Fellowship was terminated. My grant focused on testing interventions to address online misinformation and I was 8 months into a two year appointment.

Finding Hope And Spring On Transgender Day Of Visibility The past three months have been brutal for transgender people—but if there’s one thing our community knows, it’s how to travel through darkness to find spring.

1. Six years ago, during the hardest winter of my life, I found myself again. A month later, I found myself again, under a cherry blossom tree.

On Trans Day of Visibility this year, we travel through our toughest winter.

But we know the promise of spring.

Subscribe to support my journalism.

We are hiring a seasonal research intern to work in our Bur Oak ACE experiment at The Morton Arboretum. Our lab is a fun group, the experiment fascinating. Come join us!

Application:

careers.hireology.com/themortonarb...

... information:

www.wbez.org/race-class-c...

grist.org/science/to-u...

Stats question: without doing math, does anyone know of a package that does inverse predictions for glmmTMB? E.g., I have a fitted equation and I want to know the value of a predictor that yields a specific value for the response

YES, MORE OF THIS.

As I've said before, at the end of the day trans people have rights regardless of what the science says (bc that's not how we decide who gets human rights) but ALSO since there's a determined effort to frame transphobia as science, these statements are critical.

"Unprecedented": White House moves to control science funding worry researchers If the Trump administration continues targeting DEI in science and seeking to slash funding, American science will look fundamentally different.

"This administration appears to be not just setting priorities, but enforcing ideological conformity in a way that if your grant is studying something that's not aligned with a particular view of the world, it's just not going to be funded," - @epopppp.bsky.social

www.npr.org/sections/sho...

Soil properties – water availability and pH – are strongly associated to the spatial distribution of two hybridizing and sympatric oak species (Quercus spp) at local stand scale.

w/@felix-zimmermann.bsky.social, @christian-rellstab.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1111/eva.70076