Lab PhD student Erin Carroll gave a great finishing talk today at the ESPM GradFest celebration. Erin’s thesis includes work on remote sensing of intraspecific genetic variation in quaking aspen. She will be handing her dissertation this summer. Congratulations, Erin!

Please check out lab members’ work at the AGU 2025 meeting next week! Mickey Boakye B23O-1965 Plant Latex Resilience; A Vein-level Defense Strategy in Latex Producing Species Tuesday, 16 December 2025 14:15 – 17:45 Hall EFG (Poster Hall) (NOLA CC) Erin Carroll B33H-1989 Multi-Scale Remote Sensing of Genetic Variation in Quaking Aspen (Populus tremuloides) Wednesday,…

(guest post by lead author Dr. Jolanta Rieksta, who did this project as her masters’ thesis) A fundamental question in trait-based ecology is whether variation within species across environmental gradients is primarily driven by genetic differences, resulting in local adaptation with little or no variation among genotypes, or by phenotypic plasticity, where individuals can adjust…

(guest post on a new Nature Plants paper by lead author/past postdoc Dr. Ilaine Matos) Over the past 400 million years, the leaves of vascular plants have diversified to generate an astonishing variety of forms and venation architectures (Fig.1). But exactly when, why, and in which plant clades the new vein architectural combinations arose and…