Simon Lewis said it all at the end. ❤️🌳 youtu.be/Y1YbCE-cV7Y?...

Can trees save the planet? | DW Documentary

YouTube video by DW Documentary

youtu.be

Today, three new initiatives are recognized as UN World Restoration Flagships:  🏆 Restoring Brazil’s Cerrado Savannah  🏆 Integrated Resilience in the Sahel  🏆 KSA’s National Greening Program  Congratulations to our #GenerationRestoration winners!  https://ow.ly/YLxs50ZFy5h

The National Geographic report on our research in Tambopata, Perú, using 40 years of RAINFOR and historic collections by Al Gentry. Since 1983 Amazon trees are producing more fragile leaves, and are exposed to increasing thermal risk decade-on-decade www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/...

The Amazon's Trees May Be Reaching a Dangerous Tipping Point

Over the past 40 years, the same Amazon trees growing in Peru have started growing thinner, flimsier leaves. Scientists worry they’re being pushed to the brink.

nationalgeographic.com

ICYMI: New online! Genetics and genomics of hybridization

Genetics and genomics of hybridization

Nature Reviews Genetics, Published online: 11 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41576-026-00995-7Hybridization, the exchange of genes between divergent lineages, is now recognized as widespread across eukaryotes and essential to understanding genome evolution. In this Review, Schumer and Rieseberg overview methodological advances facilitating recent progress, reassess the frequency, causes and consequences of hybridization, and highlight key open questions.

dlvr.it

In the forests of Puerto Rico, individual trees from the same species can store, handle, and transport water in different ways based on the dryness of their respective habitats. https://scim.ag/3U1icy3

Surprising uniqueness of Puerto Rico’s trees could make them more resistant to drought

Two trees from the same species can vary in how they transport and manage water, improving specieswide drought resilience

scim.ag

Very cool pair of papers demonstrating little link between amount of additive genetic variation and amount of nucleotide variation within species: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Levels of additive genetic variation vary substantially between species

Adaptive potential determines how populations respond to environmental change. This study compiles evolvability estimates from over 170 multicellular species, revealing substantial variation across th...

journals.plos.org

Link to paper: nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The complex interaction between mammalian herbivores, climate, soil and fire has shaped the evolution and distribution of plant spinescence across biogeographical realms

Evolution of spinescence in mimosoid legumes.

nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Nature research paper: The forest of knowledge under global change go.nature.com/4paKpO9

The forest of knowledge under global change - Nature

The biocultural heritage of the Amazon, its plant species, plant services and cultures are at risk from climate change.

go.nature.com

📢 New Paper @royalsociety.org Our new study traces palm evolution to uncover how genome size, trait evolution, and allometry have shaped biodiversity @renskeonstein.bsky.social @biggenomes.bsky.social WilliamBaker SidonieBellot Link: doi.org/10.1098/rspb... @idiv-research.bsky.social #sDiv

Excited to see our new paper online! I’m thrilled to have been involved in this project with two fantastic collaborators. We demonstrate new methods for branch-length estimation, with implications for divergence times inference and analyses of diversification. academic.oup.com/sysbio/artic...

Coalescent-based branch length estimation improves dating of species trees

Abstract. Species trees need to be dated for many downstream applications. Some scalable molecular dating methods take a phylogenetic tree with branch leng

academic.oup.com

We can now also predict the difficulty of the multiple sequence alignment task with our new ALDiScore tool www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... The plot shows MSA difficulty prediction performance on completely unseen data

As animals with relatively large mouths, such as tortoises, have been extirpated from or declined on the Virgin Islands, plants with relatively large seeds have become “orphaned.” Without animals able to eat them, the seeds are not dispersed. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/KJn450Z6hqQ

Great new paper on the biogeography of the Brazil nut family #Lecythidaceae led by #UMichEEB PhD student Diana Medellín-Zabala. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Assembling the Neotropical Tree Flora: Andean Uplift and the Historical Biogeography of the Brazil Nut Family (Lecythidaceae)

Aim The assembly of tropical tree floras is complex, involving many lineage-specific histories; however, focusing on the biogeographic history of diverse clades can reveal general patterns. We inves...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

El levantamiento andino y la biogeografía histórica de la familia de la nuez de Brasil. Lecythidaceae se diversificó durante el Mioceno. La mayoría de especies conservaron nichos en la selva de tierras bajas, pero varios linajes se desplazaron hacia los andes. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Large circular chromosomes -> mini circular chromosomes -> hairpin chromosomes Huge congrats to Saelin Bjornson, a trainee I have the privilege to co-advise with Hereon Verbruggen, who has reported her analysis of the stepwise evolution of hairpin chromosomes in algae www.cell.com/current-biol...

In a recent @annbot.bsky.social paper, Bianca Schindler and colleagues explore the distribution and conservation of a microendemic species from the Brazilian Cerrado. doi.org/10.1093/aob/... Read more in my latest post at @botany.one! #Botany #PlantScience #SciComm 🧪 www.botany.one/tracking-and...

Tracking and Conserving an Endangered Plant from Brazil’s Rocky Outcrops

A multidisciplinary hunt uncovers new populations of an endemic plant, while exposing the fragile balance that keeps it from disappearing.

botany.one

The most incredible phylogenetic tool! I highly recommend it to everyone in the phylogeny/genomics community. I'm sure @jlsteenwyk.bsky.social has just mastered the field! 🎉

🧬Jacob L Steenwyk@jlsteenwyk.bsky.social · 7mo ago

PhyKIT has been undergoing a major transformation. Dozens of new functions/utilities, including plotting. If you've used PhyKIT before or haven't taken the plunge, please do consider checking it out. I'm really excited about expanding PhyKIT and welcome community suggestions for improvement

Once again, thank you @jlsteenwyk.bsky.social Just keep going, please!

🧬Jacob L Steenwyk@jlsteenwyk.bsky.social · 7mo ago

PhyKIT v2.1.44 can now plot quartet pie charts on a phylogeny Quartet discordance can be calculated from gene trees or parsed from ASTRAL output (-t 2) Another feature kindly suggested by @latincassia.bsky.social! I'm super grateful for user feedback and the opportunity to address community needs

I have more suggestions, don't worry! I will appear 😇 Thank you so much for all your contributions to the field and for your kindness and efficiency in helping!

🧬Jacob L Steenwyk@jlsteenwyk.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Exciting to see @latincassia.bsky.social explore some of the new PhyKIT functions In v.2.1.39+, figures are now highly customizable - users can specify figure width, height, font sizes, colors & more Thank you @latincassia.bsky.social for the suggestion! Open to more great community suggestions!

Grateful to have been able to help someone by adding a new function to PhyKIT. In v2.1.20, users can specify an occupancy threshold when creating a concatenation matrix. jlsteenwyk.com/PhyKIT/usage... bsky.app/profile/lati...

Cássia Bitencourt@latincassia.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Thank you!!!!

Thank you for your request, @latincassia.bsky.social. The create_concat function now has a thresholding argument as of version 2.1.20 Docs: jlsteenwyk.com/PhyKIT/usage... pypi release: pypi.org/project/phyk...

Potapenko et al. studied two species of barley, finding that TE silencing is central to genome size regulation, with selection maintaining smaller genomes among individuals with higher fitness in favorable habitats. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag051 #evobio #molbio #TEsky #PlantSky

Intraspecific genome size variation is attributed to adaptive silencing of transposable elements in Hordeum species

Abstract. A substantial variation in genome size has been observed among individuals of the same species. Theory predicts that increased genome size may co

doi.org

Just gonna put this here for now www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... bsky.app/profile/jlst...

Integrative phylogenomics positions sponges at the root of the animal tree

Determining whether sponges or ctenophores root the animal tree has important implications for understanding early animal evolution. Here, we examined support for these competing hypotheses by constru...

science.org

🧬Jacob L Steenwyk@jlsteenwyk.bsky.social · 11mo ago

will be sharing some big(ish) news later today :D

Are humans really the only rational animals? Our NEW PAPER 🎉 out in @science.org suggests otherwise! In a large collaboration led with my joint first author @hanna-schleihauf.bsky.social, we show that “Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs” 🧵

Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs

The selective revision of beliefs in light of new evidence has been considered one of the hallmarks of human-level rationality. However, tests of this ability in other species are lacking. We examined...

science.org

Check out the recent publication in Annual Reviews of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics where the authors explore genomic species delimitation in depth. You'll see a number of #sciart figures I created to help explain some of the concepts! www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Here, a celebration of Apocynaceae (dogbanes, milkweeds, swallow-worts etc.) fruits and flowers tucked into a phylogenetic study. Remarkable diversity. www.frontiersin.org/journals/eco...

In @theguardian.com : "Plant that mimics odour of half-eaten ants to attract pollinators discovered" www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Plant that mimics odour of half-eaten ants to attract pollinators discovered

Botanist says new Japanese species of dogbane is first evidence of plants copying ants

theguardian.com

Original publication: academic.oup.com/bioinformati... GitHub repo: github.com/JLSteenwyk/P... Docs: jlsteenwyk.com/PhyKIT/

PhyKIT: a broadly applicable UNIX shell toolkit for processing and analyzing phylogenomic data

AbstractMotivation. Diverse disciplines in biology process and analyze multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) and phylogenetic trees to evaluate their informa

academic.oup.com

Congratulations to @benbotanical.bsky.social with new publication on 'The global conservation status of plants growing on cliffs and rocky outcrops'. See paper here: doi.org/10.1016/j.ba... Includes nice dashboard available online shorturl.at/iAPY9. doi.org/10.1016/j.ba...

Did you catch this editorial in our July issue? Join Dayu Wu and Kangshan Mao as they explore how #genomic #data bursts and methodological innovations might be used to improve #plant #phylogenetics and #evolution. 🔓 ⬇️ doi.org/10.1111/jse.... #systematics #JSE