The Yoder Lab at CSUN invites applicants for the role of postdoctoral research fellow. The successful applicant will take a collaborating role in a new NSF-funded project in ecological data science, refining and applying an analysis pipeline, TARDIS, to study plant populations’ responses to environmental variation over space and time. They will work with PI…
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….
This summer, for the first time in years, the Yoder Lab is organizing weekly in-person, all-hands meetings. We’ll use the time to keep each other up to date on our various summer tasks and projects, but it’s also a good opportunity to dig into the scientific literature together. The organizing theme for these readings will…
For more than a year, now, there’s been a hole in the Yoder Lab. Last March, postdoctoral scholar Lea Richardson was admitted to the hospital with neurological symptoms that were soon diagnosed as the results of metastatic melanoma. Lea spent the subsequent months in full-time treatment and recovery from the effects of treatments, and although…
Recently, the Yoder Lab has been thinking a lot about the conditions plant populations need to flower and produce fruit — that is, to reproduce and create the next generation. We hit on the idea of using images from iNaturalist records of Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia and Y. jaegeriana) to train machine-learning models relating flowering…
For the first time in years, Out to Innovate, the national professional organization for LGBTQ+ scientists, science educators, and technical professionals, is organizing an in-person conference: a community summit hosted at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles all day Saturday, March 7. The program will feature motivational talks and panels by experts in…
Joshua trees are ending 2025 by throwing us a curveball — they’re flowering! Many contributors to iNaturalist have recorded observations of the trees flowering in the last month or so. The normal flowering season for Joshua trees starts in late February into April. So these flowers are either very late for 2025, or quite early…
Joshua trees can beat the heat of the desert with the help of a special form of photosynthesis, according to data presented in the latest peer-reviewed paper from the Joshua Tree Genome Project collaboration. The study is the first “fruit” of a multi-year experiment in growing Joshua tree seedlings in experimental gardens distributed across the…
Diving into the Discourse is the CSUN news room’s interview series, featuring conversations with faculty and staff about their research and educational projects on campus. I sat down with host Carmen Chandler last school year to talk about the lab’s work on Joshua trees, their relationship with yucca moths, and the implications for protecting desert…
The recording of my talk for the 2025 IDEA plenary is now posted over on the Evolution meeting YouTube channel (there’s a bunch of dead air at the start of the recording; the action starts a bit after the 19 minute mark). A few folks have asked for copies of the slide deck, and you…
