Christopher Dick

Looking forward to @andrewlhipp.bsky.social Andrew Hipp's Friday talk on "the nature of oak species" at the UM Herbarium. It's open to the public
lsa.umich.edu/herbarium/ne...

Just got a #blinkcamera clip of #bobcats in a territorial standoff at my cottage. Worth listening to the audio. #AlleghenyFront #Pennsylvania

Predicting the fate of tropical forests under intensifying heat Intense droughts have caused water stress and elevated mortality for trees in the Amazon, foreshadowing the future of tropical forests as the climate changes.

This is a nice (but grim) summary of the Chambers et al. paper that I was fortunate to work on.... Predicting the fate of tropical forests under intensifying heat www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Geez, I’ll have to share this with the Woody Plants class!

Yes they probably need to grow a little higher but it’s great that they’re getting their feet wet!

students in hip waders on a quaking bog

Thursday lab at the Mud Lake bog -- an exciting finale for a semester of field botany and marking the 60th anniversary of the "Woody Plants" class at @UMich @UMSEAS and #UMichEEB

Welcome to The Antiquarian Because the past matters more than ever

My little blog is growing up 🥹 It's now The Antiquarian, a weekly newsletter exploring what we know about the past, how we learn it, and why it matters. theantiquarian.email/archive/welc...

Pleased to be hosting my earliest mentor in tropical field botany Michael Nee who will be speaking at the #MICH Herbarium tomorrow (Halloween, Friday, noon-1, Oct 31) on the "Origin of Pumpkins and Squashes". Members of the public are welcome

Many congratulations to Adriane Esquivel, Rebecca Morgan and to all our colleagues supporting Amazon forest monitoring with RAINFOR and ForestPlots.net!
Our analysis of 30 years of Amazon forest change is highlighted on the cover of @natplants.nature.com.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Alison Davis Rabosky, Director of the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, poses in the museum’s Herpetology archives at the University of Michigan’s Research Museums Center.

Thais Vasconcelos, Director of the University of Michigan Herbarium, poses at the University of Michigan’s Research Museums Center.

Great pair of articles in this morning's Ann Arbor News highlighting the outstanding new leadership of the U-M Museum of Zoology and U-M Herbarium: Alison Davis Rabosky (left) and Thais Vasconcelos (right). 🍄🌿🌺🐚🪲🐟🐸🐍🐦🐿️

Amazonian hyperdominance exceeds expectations of neutral theory Our work demonstrates Amazon-wide hyperdominance necessitating deterministic explanation by first comparing data to the global dispersal neutral model, then establishing this to be a conservative tes....

Amazonian hyperdominance exceeds expectations of neutral theory 🧪🌐🌾 besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Longevity in plants impacts phylogenetic and population dynamics Phylogenies of long-lived plants often exhibit short molecular branch lengths and high levels of gene-tree conflict. However, the biological mechanisms underlying these patterns remain unclear. We e.....

fun paper with a lot of great folks @tomacarruthers.bsky.social @willweaver.bsky.social @phylieu.bsky.social @jamesbpease.bsky.social @gbradburd.bsky.social and more nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

We are hiring a full time plant mounter to join our U-M herbarium team. The person will mount specimens from around the world and train students in the plant mounting process. Cool botanical job! careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...

Michigan's #UMMZ Reptiles and Amphibians Collections Manager position is now open. Join a great museums group and help manage the world's second largest herpetology research collection. Please share! careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...

Welcome to Michigan!

Critical part of the President's new $100,000 charge for H1-B visas: The Administration can also offer a $100,000 discount to any person, company, or industry that it wants. Replacing rules with arbitrary discretion.

Want visas? You know who to call and who to flatter.

Happy to share this commentary on our new paper in @pnas.org, led by William Farhan-Rios, exploring responses of tropical tree communities to climate warming from the Amazon to Andes Mountains 🌴 ⛰️ 🌐

An uphill struggle for tropical forest trees | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Sorting of ancestral polymorphism and its impact on morphological phylogenetics and macroevolution Abstract. Intraspecific phenotypic variation provides the basic substrate upon which the evolutionary processes that give rise to morphological innovation,

Excited to share a new paper! "Sorting of ancestral polymorphism and its impact on morphological phylogenetics and macroevolution". Part of some work I've been doing on modelling the evolution of polymorphic traits in fossil echinoderms.

academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...

MSU Plant Bio is hiring a new herbarium director! Our herbarium is a wonderful resource on campus and I'm excited to have the opportunity to make it even better by bringing in a new director. Details here: plantbiology.natsci.msu.edu/job-postings...

Come join us in Corvallis! Great colleagues, a wonderful location for plant science of all types, with the added benefit of the beautiful surroundings of Oregon!

cypress tree with 30 foot diameter trunk

Following the fantastic #ATBC2025 meeting in Oaxaca I visited the Tree of Tule, a Montezuma cypress (Taxodium mucronatum) with the world's stoutest trunk. It's highly buttressed but even after smoothing it is thicker than the largest sequoia with a smoothed diameter of 30.8 feet. #bigtrees

Herbarium director position opening at Oregon State University ‪@osu-herbarium.bsky.social‬ Great opportunity for herbarium- and field-trained botanists at any rank. bpp.oregonstate.edu/bpp/about/op...

Heading to Oaxaca for #ATBC2025 ? Make sure you stop by our symposium for all things leaf temperature, heat tolerance, and tradeoffs across climate gradients 🌿💧🌡️

#NExTropics symposia at #ATBC2025 find out the latest from nutrient addition experiments from across the tropics

#ATBC2025 started. More than 1000 participants are in the room.

There almost certainly are cryptic species and a good amount of hybridization with other Eschweileras

picture of tagged tree of Eschweilera coriacea

I'll be talking about hyperdominant tropical tree species at #ATBC2025 in #Oaxaca, including some recent work on Eschweilera coriacea, which despite being possibly the most common tropical tree in the world (~5 billion trees in the Amazon basin) can be hard to identify and is poorly studied.

To Whomever vandalized the Peony Garden at the Nichols Arboretum at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor last night:

There is so little beauty in our world right now. You are making the world a more cruel and ugly place. You are not helping.

www.instagram.com/reel/DKXFSz5...

FFS that is a bad take

Exclusive: NSF faces radical shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions Changes seen as a response to presidential directives on what research to fund

This is an absolute disaster. If we don't stop this, they will turn NSF into a pawn of the Trump administration. There will be no research on climate, biodiversity, or anything that isn't eugenics or AI or how to more efficiently destroy the planet for profit.

This cannot be allowed to happen.