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The Yoder Lab is building the TARDIS, with new support from NSF

ByJB Yoder
A twig with two branches, one bearing a cluster of reddish-green fruits, the other an inflorescence of small pale blue flowers
Chaparral whitethorn, Ceanothus leucodermis, bearing flowers and fruits near the Red Box Picnic Area along the Angeles Crest Highway in early May, 2026. (Flickr, jby)

Why do Joshua trees grow only in the Mojave Desert? Why is white clover found in lawns and grasslands on every continent? The geographic distribution of a species is determined by the range of habitats and climates it can tolerate, its opportunities for dispersal, and the presence (or absence) of other beneficial (or antagonistic) species. Understanding how these factors work together to determine what species are found in a given location is one of the fundamental challenges of ecology and evolutionary biology.

The Yoder Lab has been building and testing a new method to study how plants’ flowering and fruit production — key elements, though not the only elements, of their population viability — respond to environmental variation in space and time. We call that new method temporal analysis of reproduction distributed in space, or TARDIS, a very deliberate reference to a certain science-fictional time machine, because it lets us project how populations experienced temperature and rainfall conditions in the past — or how they will experience conditions in the future. Earlier this month, we were very excited to learn that the National Science Foundation is providing us with funding to take this work to the next level, in a project that will use TARDIS to understand how plants’ life histories interact with their environmental tolerances to shape global biodiversity.

The new TARDIS project will build on our work with Joshua trees and toyon to create a TARDIS package for R with functions, example data, and documentation to run a standardized analysis pipeline: connecting iNaturalist observations of plants with flowers or fruits to weather records, then using those data to train machine-learning models that can model changes in flowering activity over time and space. The NSF grant will support Master’s students doing thesis research with TARDIS, undergrad research experiences in ecological data science, and a postdoctoral position to take ownership of the TARDIS package. The first graduate positions supported on the award will be set to start in Fall 2027, and a formal advertisement for the postdoc will likely come sooner — watch this blog or contact PI Jeremy Yoder for updates.