This summer’s Evolution meetings in Montréal included an event that has become a popular part of the conference: a Story Collider show featuring stories told by conference attendees. The 2024 edition collected tales from “Outside the Distribution”, including personal experiences in fieldwork and navigating the early stages of a research career — and also the…
A new exhibit at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, California, showcases artistic and scientific perspectives on one of the most distinctive species in the MOAH’s own back yard: Joshua trees! Desert Forest: Life with Joshua trees presents creative visual works by a diverse array of artists, in an exhibition running from September…
The next scientific conference featuring Yoder Lab research is already underway, but it’s a good deal closer to our home base than Montréal — the Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Long Beach, California. Here’s where you can see the very latest research on Joshua trees and their pollinators, considerably less than two hours from…
More than a century ago, in mid-June 1924, the Los Angeles Times devoted a photo spread and several column inches to the second-hand vacation story of some “Cadillac tourists” who saw Joshua trees bearing fruit. It meant, the Times reported, that rain was coming. M.C. Ellison of Sacramento, who has been touring Southern California in…
The Third Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology — a collaborative meeting of the American Society of Naturalists, the European Society for Evolutionary Biology, the Society of Systematic Biologists, and the Society for the Study of Evolution — begins its in-person component in Montréal, Québec in less than two weeks. Three members of the Yoder Lab will…
Last May I was invited to Washington, DC, for a symposium and workshop hosted by Northwestern University’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. Presenters in the symposium and participants in the workshop worked together to sum up the state of knowledge about lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and otherwise queer folks’ experiences in…
Late last summer, Colin Carlson messaged me with an unusual proposal: He’d been invited to give a workshop on Bayesian additive regression trees and embarcadero, his package of BART-training utilities for R. The workshop would be in Germany, and Colin couldn’t make that trip. But, since our current collaboration drew heavily on embardacero, could he…
Yoder Lab postdoctoral scholar Lea Richardson is taking on a new project, studying the other iconic plant of North American deserts — saguaro cactus. Dr. Richardson was recently selected for a new postdoctoral fellowship supported by the National Park Foundation, which provides three years of salary and research funding to conduct research in a National…
Pryce Millikin, the current Master’s student in the Yoder Lab, has won not one but three external awards providing financial support for his thesis research. Pryce started in the lab last fall, and hit the ground running on a project to understand how climate variation might impact the specialized pollinators of Joshua trees, the yucca…
One of the biggest challenges for studying biodiversity is answering a seemingly simple question, where does this species live? If we know where a species occurs, we can describe the habitat that it needs, assess how large and stable its populations are, and make informed predictions about what will happen to those populations if we…
