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…
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…
TREELOGY is a series of musical compositions commissioned by the Soraya, CSUN’s performing arts center, to celebrate three iconic tree species of California: coast redwoods, giant sequoias, and the Yoder Lab’s favorite, Joshua trees. TREELOGY premieres in just a few weeks, and this episode of the MusiKaravan vlog travels to Joshua Tree National Park to…
The Mojave Desert, home to the lab’s favorite woody monocot (Joshua tree), encompasses some of the largest tracts of undeveloped land in the continental United States. That wilderness is under increasing pressure from suburban sprawl as climate change threatens to make its desert landscapes even less hospitable to the thousands of unique native plant and…
The Yoder Lab at California State University Northridge is hiring a Postdoctoral Scholar to contribute to ongoing NSF-funded research examining Joshua tree’s adaptation to desert climates and coevolution with specialized pollinators, as part of the Joshua Tree Genome Project.
Earlier today, Master’s student Mikhail Plaza successfully defended his thesis research, in which he built a linkage map for Joshua tree and used it to reexamine data identifying genetic loci that may play a role in local adaptation to climate and to specialized pollinating yucca moths. Mikhail’s project is among the first fruits of the…
