Bea Bock

Very excited to share that I am heading to CU Boulder this May for the 2026 ESIIL Innovation Summit! 🏔️💻

We will be spending the week focused on AI for Sustainability, Earth embeddings, and open environmental data. Can't wait to collaborate with this community.

Home | Bea Bock - Studying Plant-Fungal Associations Researching how plants and fungi associate. Currently searching for Postdoc opportunities. Beatrice Bock (included for searchability).

Finally gave my digital home a renovation! 🛠️

I moved away from just listing dissertation chapters to sharing actual resources. You can now find my open-source R packages (nanodRop), wet lab protocols, and NLP workflows all in one place.

Open science or bust! 🧬💻

beabockm.wixsite.com/bea-bock

People often assume Arizona is just saguaros and heat. Meanwhile, Flagstaff is doing this. ❄️

The roads are messy, but the coding productivity is high today. Hunkering down with data pipelines now (and dreaming of thawing out in there later). Stay warm, friends!

Beyond ’survival’ of the fittest: Evolution works in teams - Binghamton News Review of scientific studies shows that natural selection operates on multiple levels

Press release by @binghamtonu.bsky.social about our @frontiersin.bsky.social in #Ecology & #Evolution rev: “Abundant empirical evidence of multilevel selection revealed by a bibliometric review”.

Natural selection operates from molecules to ecosystems.

#MLS

www.binghamton.edu/news/story/6...

Predicting forest decline requires us to bridge this gap between above- and belowground biodiversity. As I look at my own cottonwood data, this paper remains a vital benchmark for what’s happening at scale. 🧪📈 #ScienceSky #Mycorrhiza #Populus

My favorite findings: AMF become more common with increased temperature, while EMF (diversity and presence) drops off. For trees that rely on EMF, the available and ideal fungal partners might be diminishing.

Returning to Van Nuland et al. (2023) this morning. 🍄 It’s one of those papers that stays relevant because the continental-scale dataset on Populus fungal associations is just that good.

So kind - best of luck to you too :)

📢 A new publication from our team is now out in the
@ecologicalsociety.bsky.social BULLETIN!
👉 doi.org/10.1002/bes2...

It shows how community, collaboration, & multilingual science are not extras—they are essential for equity in ecology. 🌎

📢Please share to amplify Latin American voices!

Thank you :)

The Changing Chemistry of Invasive Death Cap Mushrooms University of Wisconsin–Madison researchers just released a groundbreaking study on the same mushrooms behind an uptick in poisonings in California.

UW–Madison scientists have published new research about the makeup of death cap mushrooms (Amanita phalloides) after learning that its spread across continents has changed the chemistry of the species. 🍄‍🟫

Dissertation: SUBMITTED to my committee! 🥂🧬

It’s a strange feeling to finally hand over the document I’ve been living with for so long. Huge thanks to everyone who helped me get to this point. Next stop: PhD Defense! 🦋

#ScienceSky #PhDLife #BiologicalSciences #GradSchool

Grateful to the New Phytologist Foundation for making this possible. Can’t wait for some great science down under!

So excited to announce I've received the ECR Award from the International Mycorrhiza Society! I’ll be heading to Cairns, Australia this summer for ICOM as the North American travel award recipient.

Fluid mechanics within mycorrhizal networks: exploring concepts, traits, and methodologies Mycorrhizal fungi form hyphal networks for water and solute transport between soil and plant roots. Trait-based research on these organisms typically focuses on spores and resource exchange structure...

We discussed his recent paper in @newphyt.bsky.social, linked here: doi.org/10.1111/nph....

YouTube video by Mycorrhizas Pedro M. Antunes on fluid mechanics within mycorrhizal networks

I loved hosting this interview with Dr. Pedro M. Antunes for the South American Mycorrhizal Research Network!

We dove into the fluid mechanics of mycorrhizal networks and why biological sciences need more interdisciplinary physics thinking.

Watch here: youtu.be/zqaS6ZBimYA

So glad to finally be doing @carpentries.org Instructor Training! The focus on mental models and live coding feedback is a total game changer for how I approach technical workshops in the biosciences. Highly recommend for any researcher! 🧪✨

#Carpentries #ScienceSky #OpenScience

Automated extraction of fungal trophic modes from literature using BioBERT: an open pilot workflow Fungi exhibit diverse trophic strategies, ranging from obligate symbiosis to saprotrophy, with some taxa capable of occupying multiple ecological roles. Manually identifying trophic versatility from l...

Link to original study: doi.org/10.3897/rio....

Using AI to Uncover the Secret Lives of Fungi | Blog AI holds the potential to automatically identify fungal versatility from the available scientific literature.

A new study led by Northern Arizona University's @beabock.bsky.social demonstrates how a specialised language model called 𝐁𝐢𝐨𝐁𝐄𝐑𝐓 can scan decades of research in minutes to identify fungi, with almost 90% accuracy.

Read more about it on our blog: blog.pensoft.net/2026/02/05/u...

So grateful :)

🌱 IMS Early Career Researcher Travel Award 🍄

Congrats to Beatrice M. Bock USA
🏆 North America awardee

Supported by The New Phytologist Foundation @newphyt.bsky.social
This award supports her participation with oral presentation at #ICOM2026

#Mycorrhiza

Evidence for common fungal networks among plants formed by a Dark Septate Endophyte in Sorghum bicolor - Communications Biology A lab experiment shows that Dark Septate Endophytes can form common fungal networks between plants, increasing biomass and enabling water movement, suggesting that non-mycorrhizal fungi may contribute...

In our review of CMNs, water stood out as a resource that might be transferred between plants via fungal connections. This new study provides further support (and in DSEs!). Nice expt by Bea Bock et al 👍 Great to see new research.

doi.org/10.1038/s420...