Ben R Lee, PhD

#ToReadPile

Fig. 1 The window for spring ephemerals’ pollination is constrained by the timing of pollinator activity and canopy closure. Curves represent the hypothetical progression of flowering (pink), pollinator activity (yellow), and canopy development (green) in a forest community through time. Dotted lines delineate the window of time during which pollination can occur. Artwork by Gabriela Sincich.

Check our new publication about shifted spring ephemeral pollination window impacted by flowering time, pollinator occurrence, and canopy closure under climate change! #phenology #springbeauty #phenologicalmismatch #climatechange @parklab.bsky.social
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

up to three years of support for postdoctoral researchers in the broad area of the diversity of life and/or organisms in their natural environments cns.utexas.edu/research/res... 🧪🌎

Spruce trees emerge from the clouds and fog

Spruce trees line the puddle-lined path into the clouds and fog

A line of spruce lies barely-visible in the clouds on Roan bald

Spruce line a trail thay appears to lead to the edge of a cliff and clouds

Love seeing trees emerge from low-hanging clouds

Bright pink flowers hang suspended in front of a thick cloud bank in the background

Bright yellow flowers hang in the foreground above a carpet of green leaves and grey stones

Flowers with a gradient of red, orange, and yellow petals hang in front of greenery with clouds and fog in the background

White ghost pipes (a parasitic plant) burst forth from the dark brown forest floor

And a very cloudy #WildflowerHour as well along the #AT!

A light brown and white mushroom bursts up from a dark brown, moss-covered forest floor

A small mushroom the color of a ripe cherry tomato and covered with yellow-white flecks bursts with color against a dark brown forest floor covered with old spruce needles

A chestnut brown mushroom as seen from above imposed over a dark brown forest floor covered with spruce needles and twigs

Filamentous white coral fungi reach up to the sky from beneath the root of a spruce tree. Moss and dark brown soil can be seen in the background

Sunday Fun(gi)day up on top of Roan Mountain this morning. #mushrooms #hiking #appalachia #AT

Know an Evolutionary Genomicist looking for a faculty position? Join us in EEB @utknoxville.bsky.social Position is open for studying any organism, but personally I have some botany bias. 🌱 Apply before Sept 19 for full consideration. apply.interfolio.com/170735 Please share widely. Thanks!

Stunning breakthrough: the platypus and echidnas came from the South Pole Just when you thought Australia’s animals couldn’t get any weirder comes the astounding revelation that the ancestors of the platypus and echidnas evolved in Antarctica.

Do you ever stop and think to yourself 'wow, the antarctic forests of the cretaceous and eocene were probably *really weird*'

Screenshot of a web page, showing a table with admission percentage, yield percentage, average price, and other information for three selected colleges

Prediction page showing where people from Delaware get Biology degrees: over 40% from the U. of Delaware, for example

Table showing where people get PhDs in Ecology: UC Davis, Colorado State, and more

Table showing comparison of UC Berkeley vs similar colleges in teaching: undergrads per tenure track instructor, undergrads per all instructors, total instructors, and more

Just a reminder as people start considering college / grad school: I made a website pulling federal info on colleges, free to use (made it for my kids). Gives characteristics of schools, info on degrees awarded, #rstats shiny prediction on where people may get their degree, etc.

collegetables.info

#ToReadPile

With many postdoc grants like the NSF PRFB, Ford Fellowship, and Hanna H. Gray fellowships disappearing, I am currently looking for grants that could fund incoming postdoctoral scholars. Here is a thread of some of them 🧵

Bright orange and yellow, umbrella-shaped fungus (chicken of the woods) grows out the side of a black cherry tree.

Bright orange and yellow, umbrella-shaped chicken of the woods fungus grows out the side of a log on the forest floor surrounded by bright green ferns and forbs

Missing conferences for field work, but at least there's fresh chicken-of-the-woods at our sites!

#mushrooms #foraging

#ToReadPile

UPDATE: Rep. @brotherjones_ BLOCKED from entering the event at the airport Hilton with Elon Musk’s Boring company announcing the secrecy-shrouded Nashville airport tunnel with the state

The airport & event are in his district

Other lawmakers were allowed in. @GovBillLee spoke

Video coming

Join the Society of Herbarium Curators today! Membership benefits include Student Research Awards and an active Eary Career Section that is great for networking! Join at the link below or via theQR code.

www.herbariumcurators.org/membership/

The image shows two bright yellow lily-like flowers with six backward-curving petals each. The flowers have distinctive red-orange stamens and pistils protruding from their centers. They emerge from mottled green leaves with brown spots characteristic of trout lilies. The plants are growing among fallen brown leaves on what appears to be a woodland floor, with a blurred forest background.

📝 The plants that photosynthesise to a deadline 🧵
doi.org/pxnj

In the forest understorey, Spring fires the starting gun on a race to catch sunlight before the forest canopy fills. But changing climates means different plants now start at different times.

#Botany #PlantScience 🧪 #InBrief

Binaries shirt Pre-order You can't put biology into a box. Whatever rule you try to impose on nature, a species, population, or individual will break that rule. Embrace...

My brother moves in this weekend & I’m panicking. I still have all this Skype a scientist merch in his room & there’s a crab in the kitchen. Who let me own a home?!

If you were ever thinking about buying one of these t shirts today is a GREAT time lmao 😅😅😅

squidfacts.bigcartel.com/product/bina...

Martinez-Gomez Lab Plant Evo-Devo

A little belated but I've started a faculty position at Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology department at @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social. I'm absolutely stoked! I'll be recruiting at all levels and will be at #Botany2025

Reach out!

www.martinezgomezlab.com

And because #IAmABotanist (at least partially), my wife was gracious enough to encourage me to bring my press to the wedding as well!

A man in a black tuxedo kisses a woman in a white wedding dress on a lawn under trees. Groomsmen and an officiant clap in the background

A bride, a groom, and ten grromsmen/bridesmaids pose for a group photo holding bouquets under a wooden lattice

A man and woman smile at the camera in front of a beige wall

Two hands are interlaced showing off some new wedding rings. The background is a lawn shaded by trees in front of a beautiful blue sky and the Azure waters of lake Michigan

Bummed to be missing #Botany2025 this week, but it's for a good reason! I spent last weekend solidifying and celebrating my longest, most important, and most meaningful collaboration with my favorite person in the world in a place we both love 🤵‍♂👰‍♀

Really excellent work from a really amazing person and scientist @liting-zheng.bsky.social at UMich IGCB!

Cluster hire in ecosystem ecology at UGA! Come join us! 🌎🌱

Serious FOMO from missing conferences this year, but what a great resource to see who's attending!

Dune grass and other plants grow along the sides of a candy trail that leads out past the dunes to Lake Michigan. The sky above is bright blue with wispy clouds

Bright red and yellow fruit hang down below bright green leaves amongst a background of various plants

Bright white flowers bloom in front of a background of sand dunes and other plant life

Pale pink milkweed flowers blossom amongst broad green leaves

Dune climb botanizing at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore #USNPS #Botany #Flowers #FindYourPark

My department has open positions at Level B (Lecturer) or Level C (Senior Lecturer), - one position in Genomics and two in Ecology. #PlantSciJobs

Applications close on Thursday 7 August Aussie time
careers.pageuppeople.com/513/cw/en/jo...

careers.pageuppeople.com/513/cw/en/jo...

Mount Rainier, as seen from a plane, rises in the midst of the cascade mountain range. Rainier is white and snow capped but surrounded by shades of blue on land and in the bluebird blue sky

The Queen in blue

Tracing holotype trajectories: Mapping the movement of the most valuable herbarium specimens Global efforts to protect biodiversity depend on fair access to key plant specimens. This study examines the distribution of 119,361 holotypes—unique herbarium specimens used to formally describe new...

Interesting study on holotypes, where they were collected compared to where they are stored. “The distance between collection sites and herbaria has decreased over time, that is, around 1800, the median distance was 8,800 km, while by 2000 it decreased to 750 km.” doi.org/10.1002/ppp3...

A morning view of the Spokane River with willows and other trees lining a broad river. Large stones compose the banks and the sun is shining in a bright blue sky

Pink flowers of a narrow-leaved milkweed open in front of long, crescent shaped leaves

Bright blue-purple flowers open in the foreground with blurry leaves and stones behind

An unopened, white flower is surrounded by floral buds and river stones

Always love coming back home to Washington

Hiring/Seeking a *permanent* programmer in ecological modelling at my lab @unibonn.bsky.social. We mechanistically model plant communities, island biogeography, species range dynamics, eco-evolutionary feedbacks, diversity gradients, tropical forests, vascular epiphytes. Pls rt! shorturl.at/Bzzdt

On July 5, as floodwaters were starting to recede, FEMA received 3,027 calls from disaster survivors and answered 3,018, or roughly 99.7 percent, the documents show. Contractors with four call center companies answered the vast majority of the calls. That evening, however, Ms. Noem did not renew the contracts with the four companies and hundreds of contractors were fired, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter. The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or roughly 35.8 percent, according to the documents. And on Monday, July 7, the agency fielded 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, or around 15.9 percent, the documents sho

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/c...