@sarahecologist.bsky.social
Plant ecology; biodiversity change; Great Lakes coasts/islands/forests/wetlands; plant conservation; natural history in higher ed teaching; botanist 🌿 -Views are my own.
Do you mentor scientific writing, or use written assignments in the science courses you teach? Do you find mentoring/teaching writing hard, or time consuming? (Because it is!) Our new book can help, and it's getting close to being in your hands.
04.09.2025 15:51 — 👍 29 🔁 18 💬 2 📌 3
I wrote (ranted) on experimental design as I was frustrated as an editor at how little guidance students were getting. I underestimated the interest in the issue: it has been downloaded 10,000+ times! Clearly it’s something we need to be talking about more. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
07.11.2024 21:24 — 👍 319 🔁 153 💬 15 📌 13
My new paper is out! 🧪🦠
Seven years later: native AMF inoculation improves grassland restoration successional stage, floristic quality index, and diversity, while suppressing weeds: academic.oup.com/femsle/artic...
Why microbes matter in restoration 🧵
Herbarium specimens reveal drivers of Arctic shrub growth @newphyt.bsky.social
Shrub specimens can be used to recreate annual growth chronologies and help understand plant responses to global change.
With @annebeejay.bsky.social, ZA Panchen, JDM Speed
nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
USFS 🌲 does some of the most direct and impactful conservation and management work — another line to fight for when you SPEAK UP to Congress and other leaders.
31.05.2025 16:39 — 👍 23 🔁 10 💬 1 📌 0
Illustration of a Greenlandic landscape, showing in the foreground Rhododendron lapponicum on a cliff, with sea ice and icebergs in the background. Illustration by Alberto S. Ballesteros (@asbillustration.bsky.social)
🌸Plant diversity dynamics over space and time in a warming Arctic 🌸
Our new study @nature.com analysed plant diversity change in >2000 tundra plots over 4 decades. We found that plants changed unevenly, mostly driven by warming and biotic interactions.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🧵 (1/7) 🌐🧪🌱🌍
Long-term studies aren’t optional, they’re essential
03.05.2025 02:17 — 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Two purple cone flowers. A white box with text that says, "we're hiring, go.illinois.edu/prijobs."
🌿 Botany Field Technician – Join Illinois Natural History Survey!
Assist with vegetation surveys, seed dispersal research, and drone imagery analysis at Illinois Beach State Park. Up to 2 positions available! Apps due March 17, 2025. 👉 blogs.illinois.edu/view/7426/70...
Related: who has stories of what happened to small herbaria after colleges closed? Were you successful in getting permission during college closure to transfer specimens? Were they trashed? Still sitting in time-frozen buildings?
27.02.2025 12:11 — 👍 6 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
Figure 2. Measuring changes in insect biodiversity (centre column 'Metrics' and 'Trends') can be achieved by focusing on drivers that directly or indirectly impact insect biodiversity metrics and trends (left column 'Drivers of Change'). Where data on insect populations specifically are unavailable, data from other species and ecological processes can provide inferential support for changes in insect biodiversity (right column 'Indicators of Change').
*New paper* Denialism campaigns are growing in attempts to discredit science, scientists, and the scientific process generally. Biodiversity loss denial is a new phenomenon that needs our attention.
-With @alexanderlees.bsky.social + Eliza Grames!
#CommSky 🧪🌏 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Iwamoto Achtomatic 10x loupe in a person's hand. Plants in background.
Looking close-up just got clearer, thanks to this meaningful gift. The ability to view and appreciate the world at different scales and through different lenses is something I will always be thankful for. Why am I only now discovering this awesome loupe? What's your favorite?
10.02.2025 23:47 — 👍 5 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Reminder - Don't forget about our grants! We offer #grants for undergrads & graduate students doing research, going to symposia or workshops, and more, and the deadline for submission is coming up soon - Feb 15! Details can be found here: www.torreybotanical.org/grants-awards/
#botany 🧪🌎🌿🍄🌾
A landscape showing a coastal wetland in northern Michigan
A landscape showing a coastal wetland in eastern Michigan
A landscape showing a coastal wetland in western Michigan
A landscape showing a coastal wetland in northern Ohio
Coastal wetlands of #GreatLakes come in all shapes and sizes, but the one thing they share in common is how important they are!
They're kind of like the rainforests of the #GreatLakes - lots of biodiversity and productivity, and also facing threats from development #WorldWetlandsDay
We have a great list of ongoing award, fellowship and grant opportunities that we thought our members might be interested in. 🌍 #conservation #MarineLife #ecology
Check it out here: docs.google.com/document/d/1...
#conservation #funding #fellowships #awards
Very excited to see this important study out. The 1988 fires continue to yield new clues to the future. Great work led by @nathankiel.bsky.social
30.01.2025 00:30 — 👍 10 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
Seed banks are a way for plants to travel through time, asleep until they’re called back up into the sun. Nitrogen fertilizers threaten that process.
🌎🌱🌿🧪
Each year, we offer several #awards for undergraduate & graduate botanical #research, training and symposia. Applications are open for this winter, the deadline for submissions Feb 15, 2025! Learn more and apply here:
www.torreybotanical.org/grants-awards/
#botany #grants 🧪🌎🌿🍄🌾
Calling grad students researching rare & endangered plants native to the U.S.! Apps close soon for the 🌺 Catherine H. Beattie Graduate Fellowship in Plant Conservation 🌺
📆 due 1/31/25
💸research grant <=$4.5k, compensation for work at a botanical garden by the student
saveplants.org/about-us/fel...
Our new paper is out, open access, in AJB. We used these more frequent heavy rainfall events to our benefit in natural experiments combined with mesocosm and greenhouse work to show variation in the response of 5 dominant grasses in Midwestern prairies. Thanks, UW-Madison, for funding open access.
09.01.2025 18:32 — 👍 5 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0The insanity of being a fire ecologist in the epicenter of a major fire event, bags packed and ready to evacuate, watching active fire from my window, while taking media requests and explaining to the public, for the 100,000th time how climate change is largely responsible for this
08.01.2025 19:52 — 👍 34730 🔁 7776 💬 601 📌 206It's January 1st, and I'm revisiting videos from my summer research. Despite the swarming mosquitoes and the discomfort of those field days, my memory seems to be filtering out the annoyances, leaving me with a surprising sense of peace and a longing to be back in those woods. #fieldwork #nostalgia
02.01.2025 03:06 — 👍 12 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Piles of 10-15 specimens of cut twigs, mostly of deciduous woody trees and shrubs, lacking leaves. Twigs are on a lab table, and the arms of 3 students can be seen. Students are writing labels for specimens.
Plant ID in winter helps enforce careful observations at multiple scales. For review, students tackled a "botanical mystery" involving 4 bags of twigs (diff. habitats, including some ecotones). They ID'd twigs & developed plausible explanations of source habitats, enforcing nat. history of species.
17.12.2024 14:16 — 👍 11 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0Sometimes it isn't immediately clear that student-collected plant community data gathered during fast-paced field labs does have long-term value. Just be consistent, keep it simple, save the data, and be patient. You may be surprised what time reveals!
16.12.2024 14:13 — 👍 10 🔁 1 💬 2 📌 0
Tall (6 ft) and thriving grass (Phragmites australis ssp. americanus) over-tops short-statured plants of an interdunal wetland by Lake Superior. The grass has stiff, red stems and broad leaves (1+ cm wide) that vary from green to yellow on this cloudy October day in 2024.
Three people stand in the middle of an interdunal wetland in front of a dense patch of dead, gray stalks (5-6+ ft tall) that remain from Phragmites australis ssp. americanus. Hybrid cattail plants (3-4 ft sword-shaped, yellow-green leaves) invade the shorter-statured fen vegetation in front of the people. Trees (mostly White pine, balsam fir, red maple) can be seen on an old forested dune behind the wetland near Lake Superior.
My wetlands class monitors a coastal peatland transitioning to marsh. Annually, we see hybrid cattail encroach the fen, but the advance of the native Phragmites has been most notable. This year, almost all of the Phragmites died; perhaps a pulse-stable process with recent high water! Typha lives on.
16.12.2024 13:40 — 👍 9 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 1
