Christopher Dick

Full time job opportunity for a scientific illustrator to work with us at the U-Michigan museum of zoology and herbarium! careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...

USDA approves blight resistant chestnut trees. www.newyorkupstate.com/outdoors/202...

UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke to combine herbaria, creating the third-largest university plant collection in the United States ncbg.unc.edu/2026/08/31/u...

Phil Fearnside studied with John Vandermeer and Dan Janzen at #UMich for his 1978 PhD — all three are still very active #UMichEEB

excellent post by Rebecca Arends on Ann Arbor's deer and the need to minimally monitor population size and impacts #A2council

Dan Janzen is one of the most influential tropical ecologists of his generation. But there's more to his story than a solitary scientist working a remote Costa Rican dry forest. news.mongabay.com/2026/08/dani...

Any forest ecology types out there have experience with "Swedish Tree Grippers"? Seriously considering acquiring some for canopy work but they are costly.

My favorite photo of #MICH and #UMichEEB grad student @dmedellinz.bsky.social She's holding a leaf from a Colombian species of Gustavia (Lecythidaceae). lsa.umich.edu/herbarium/ne...

A landmark study following 15+ years of collaboration by researchers at the Arboretum, @duke-university.bsky.social, @harvard.edu, and partners in Mexico published this week on @pnas.org. It reveals what made the mountains of Mexico and Central America a hotspot for oak biodiversity: arb.eco/4tVWclh

Open letter for UMich profs + students to protest President Grasso's cowardly reproach of Dr. Peterson's Spring Commencement speech acknowledging those—women, Jewish students, Black students, pro-Palestinian student activists—who "refused to accept the enclosures and orthodoxies of their time."

El levantamiento andino y la biogeografía histórica de la familia de la nuez de Brasil. Lecythidaceae se diversificó durante el Mioceno. La mayoría de especies conservaron nichos en la selva de tierras bajas, pero varios linajes se desplazaron hacia los andes. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Postdoc opportunity in plant systematics + phylogenomics 🌿 my lab at the University of Michigan is recruiting for a Research Fellow working on species delimitation in neotropical myrtles. Full details + apply here (deadline April 30) careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...

Great new paper on the biogeography of the Brazil nut family #Lecythidaceae led by #UMichEEB PhD student Diana Medellín-Zabala. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Postdoctoral position in Forest Genetics at @uni-freiburg.de with a focus on local adaptation and/or stress reaction of trees. The position combines research and teaching (4 SWS), and offers the opportunity to develop an independent research profile (4+ years).

Looking forward to @andrewlhipp.bsky.social Andrew Hipp's Friday talk on "the nature of oak species" at the UM Herbarium. It's open to the public lsa.umich.edu/herbarium/ne...

Just got a #blinkcamera clip of #bobcats in a territorial standoff at my cottage. Worth listening to the audio. #AlleghenyFront #Pennsylvania

This is a nice (but grim) summary of the Chambers et al. paper that I was fortunate to work on.... Predicting the fate of tropical forests under intensifying heat www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Thursday lab at the Mud Lake bog -- an exciting finale for a semester of field botany and marking the 60th anniversary of the "Woody Plants" class at @UMich @UMSEAS and #UMichEEB

My little blog is growing up 🥹 It's now The Antiquarian, a weekly newsletter exploring what we know about the past, how we learn it, and why it matters. theantiquarian.email/archive/welc...

Pleased to be hosting my earliest mentor in tropical field botany Michael Nee who will be speaking at the #MICH Herbarium tomorrow (Halloween, Friday, noon-1, Oct 31) on the "Origin of Pumpkins and Squashes". Members of the public are welcome

Many congratulations to Adriane Esquivel, Rebecca Morgan and to all our colleagues supporting Amazon forest monitoring with RAINFOR and ForestPlots.net! Our analysis of 30 years of Amazon forest change is highlighted on the cover of @natplants.nature.com. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Great pair of articles in this morning's Ann Arbor News highlighting the outstanding new leadership of the U-M Museum of Zoology and U-M Herbarium: Alison Davis Rabosky (left) and Thais Vasconcelos (right). 🍄🌿🌺🐚🪲🐟🐸🐍🐦🐿️

fun paper with a lot of great folks @tomacarruthers.bsky.social @willweaver.bsky.social @phylieu.bsky.social @jamesbpease.bsky.social @gbradburd.bsky.social and more nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

We are hiring a full time plant mounter to join our U-M herbarium team. The person will mount specimens from around the world and train students in the plant mounting process. Cool botanical job! careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...

Michigan's #UMMZ Reptiles and Amphibians Collections Manager position is now open. Join a great museums group and help manage the world's second largest herpetology research collection. Please share! careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...

Critical part of the President's new $100,000 charge for H1-B visas: The Administration can also offer a $100,000 discount to any person, company, or industry that it wants. Replacing rules with arbitrary discretion. Want visas? You know who to call and who to flatter.

Happy to share this commentary on our new paper in @pnas.org, led by William Farhan-Rios, exploring responses of tropical tree communities to climate warming from the Amazon to Andes Mountains 🌴 ⛰️ 🌐 An uphill struggle for tropical forest trees | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Excited to share a new paper! "Sorting of ancestral polymorphism and its impact on morphological phylogenetics and macroevolution". Part of some work I've been doing on modelling the evolution of polymorphic traits in fossil echinoderms. academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...

MSU Plant Bio is hiring a new herbarium director! Our herbarium is a wonderful resource on campus and I'm excited to have the opportunity to make it even better by bringing in a new director. Details here: plantbiology.natsci.msu.edu/job-postings...

Come join us in Corvallis! Great colleagues, a wonderful location for plant science of all types, with the added benefit of the beautiful surroundings of Oregon!

Following the fantastic #ATBC2025 meeting in Oaxaca I visited the Tree of Tule, a Montezuma cypress (Taxodium mucronatum) with the world's stoutest trunk. It's highly buttressed but even after smoothing it is thicker than the largest sequoia with a smoothed diameter of 30.8 feet. #bigtrees

Herbarium director position opening at Oregon State University ‪@osu-herbarium.bsky.social‬ Great opportunity for herbarium- and field-trained botanists at any rank. bpp.oregonstate.edu/bpp/about/op...

Heading to Oaxaca for #ATBC2025 ? Make sure you stop by our symposium for all things leaf temperature, heat tolerance, and tradeoffs across climate gradients 🌿💧🌡️

#NExTropics symposia at #ATBC2025 find out the latest from nutrient addition experiments from across the tropics

#ATBC2025 started. More than 1000 participants are in the room.

I'll be talking about hyperdominant tropical tree species at #ATBC2025 in #Oaxaca, including some recent work on Eschweilera coriacea, which despite being possibly the most common tropical tree in the world (~5 billion trees in the Amazon basin) can be hard to identify and is poorly studied.

The legendary USGS Bee Lab is being shut down. The 2026 budget proposal defunds the Ecosystem Mission Area, which supported the lab. If their science helped your work, there’s still time to make your voice heard. Read below. (1/4) 🧪 #pollinators #Pollinators #USGS #Entomology #Hymenoptera 🪲🪳

I continue to be awed by the Blanding's turtles at the ES George reserve #ESGR. A U-M grad student first tagged them in 1953. At 95 years old, our oldest marked female shows no sign of aging and reproduces with as much vigor as a 20 yr old! lsa.umich.edu/herbarium/ne...

Spring newsletter from the U-M Museum of Zoology #UMMZ and Herbarium #MICH (EEB museums) with a story from the ES George Reserve #ESGR on our elderly Blanding's turtles lsa.umich.edu/eeb/alumni-f...

🌳⚠️Out now in Systematic Biology⚠️🌳 We find rampant reticulation in Inga, the blindingly rapid Amazonian tree radiation! ⚡ BONUS: We also find introgression and selection on genes underlying chemical defences, helping Ingas resist relentless insect herbivory 🐛☠️🌳 academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

Fully on board with dems running for office promising to reinstate fired federal employees and jail this administration’s various criminals, but let’s go ahead and add “we will seize by eminent domain any national parkland sold to developers”

The tropical timber tree angelique, Dicorynia guianensis, is locally adapted to the east-west rainfall gradient in French Guiana! Congrats to Julien Bonnier for publishing this PhD chapter in Molecular Ecology! doi.org/10.1111/mec....

Measles is our most infectious disease, can pass to others even 2 hours after a victim passes through a room, and kills 1 to 3 people per 1000--mostly young, unvaccinated children. Please get your children vaccinated.