LEC Biodiversity News

WashU partners with Focal Point, a local landscaping business, to implement sustainable landscape practices on its campus.

Many North American migratory birds are shrinking in size as temperatures have warmed over the past 40 years. But those with very big brains, relative to their body size, did not shrink as much as smaller-brained birds, according to new research from Washington University in St. Louis. The study is the first to identify a direct link between cognition and animal response to human-made climate change.

National Geographic Explorer Danielle Lee reveals the incredible array of wildlife often hiding in plain sight in our cities. Her other mission? As a Black scientist, she wants to open the door for others to join the field.

Aryeh Miller, a graduate student in the Evolution, Ecology, and Population Biology program at Washington University is also the lead author on a study, recently published in Oxford’s science journal, Systematic Biology, about how lizard species with sticky toe pads have an evolutionary advantage over their padless counterparts. LEC post-doc James Stroud co-authored the paper with Miller.

Postdoctoral researcher, Mariana Braga, has modeled how butterfly-plant interactions evolve.

With funding support from LEC, researchers look at whether Ozark oases at Tyson Research Center — climate change refugia — could help species persist in spite of rising temperatures.

Low-income communities and communities of color are disproportionately harmed by air pollution from burning fossil fuels and by the health risks of climate change. Transitioning away from fossil fuels takes economic and political support, a difficult ask for St. Louis, a city located in a state with one of the highest rates of coal consumption in the country. New technical and scientific funding support from foundations, combined with a recent push by city leaders, religious communities, and clean energy advocates, is putting in place sustainability programs and policies that are moving the Midwest city in a new direction.

Meet Elizabeth Carlen, a Living Earth Collaborative postdoc and NSF postdoctoral fellow working in the Losos lab at Washington University

The Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis announced the recipients of its fourth round of seed grant funding.

Jane Melville, senior curator of terrestrial vertebrates at Museums Victoria and associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Monash University, led the collaborative research effort to emphasize the importance of prioritizing taxonomic research in conservation as part of a Fulbright Fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis.

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences rewrites the origins of domesticated watermelons. The study corrects a 90-year-old mistake that lumped watermelons into the same category as the South African citron melon. Instead, researchers, including Susanne S. Renner, a first author now at Washington University in St. Louis, found that a Sudanese form with non-bitter whitish pulp, known as the Kordofan melon (C. lanatus), is the closest relative of domesticated watermelons.

Talk about a rude awakening. Brood X cicadas are coming of age in world that is drastically altered from the one their ancestors knew. LEC Postdoctoral Fellow, Brett Seymoure is a behavioral ecologist who studies the effect of lighting on animal behavior.

Andean forests have high potential to store carbon under climate change. The study — which draws upon two decades of data from 119 forest-monitoring plots in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Argentina — was produced by an international team of scientists including researchers supported by the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis. The lead author was Alvaro Duque from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia Sede Medellín.

The Elizabeth “Ibby” Danforth Butterfly Garden began as a service project of the Washington University Women’s Club in 1996, to honor the eponymous wife of former chancellor William Danforth.

Black-and-white ruffed lemurs and diademed sifakas are the focus of Living Earth Collaborative effort in Madagascar to find out how to best support these two endangered species.

“Climate change is altering when plants are blooming, and it’s disrupting the historic relationships between plants and their pollinators,” said Matthew Austin, an ecologist and biodiversity postdoctoral fellow with the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis. “But we know remarkably little about what effect that has on how plants interact with one another and the evolutionary consequences of altered plant-plant interactions.”

Peter H. Raven, George Engelmann Professor Emeritus of Botany at Washington University and Missouri Botanical Garden President Emeritus, has released Driven by Nature, his newly released autobiography that takes readers across multiple continents and decades.

Today, the Climatron celebrates its 60th birthday. In 1960, the Missouri Botanical Garden opened the Climatron, a domed conservatory packed with orchids, palms, and other tropical plants. Today, more than 2,800 plants, including 1,400 different tropical species, grow inside the Climatron

New research from Washington University in St. Louis helps flesh out the origin story for the so-called “lost crops.” These plants may have fed as many Indigenous people as maize, but until the 1930s had been lost to history.

Postdoctoral fellow Yusan Yang shares her path to Washington University and her belief that biology is not simply a formula or rule set to be followed.

Biologist James Stroud, a postdoctoral research associate in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, discovered that the lizard community responded in an unexpected way: all of them could tolerate cold temperatures down to about 42 degrees Fahrenheit, regardless of their species’ previous ability to withstand cold.

Missouri Botanical Garden researchers are using the diverse landscape at Washington University’s Tyson Research Center in Eureka, Missouri to find what kind of landscapes can buffer plants against climate change.

Dr. Fangqiong Ling has won the 2020 Rising Star Award, which is presented to a promising young scientist in the field.

Climate change is affecting the spread and severity of infectious diseases around the world. The research, led by Vanessa Ezenwa, a professor of ecology at the University of Georgia, and funded by the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis, describes how parasites can cause animals to produce more methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

Keepers at the Saint Louis Zoo in Missouri were surprised to discover that one of their ball pythons had produced seven eggs – despite having no contact with a male for over 15 years.

New research from an international team including Rachel Penczykowski, an assistant professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis shows that infection actually makes a plant more susceptible to secondary infection — in experiments and in the wild. The findings are published Aug. 31 in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The Congo Basin is home to the world’s second-largest rainforest and a unique array of biodiversity. But the ecosystem’s remote location cannot protect it from the threat of poaching. Special correspondent Monica Villamizar and videographer Phil Caller traveled to the Central African Republic before the pandemic to report on indigenous tribal hunters working to protect endangered wildlife.

Wildlife of greater St. Louis area comes into focus in new biodiversity project. The St. Louis Wildlife Project is a collaboration between St. Louis College of Pharmacy and the Tyson Research Center at Washington University in St. Louis. The project aims to quantify biodiversity and improve the understanding of wildlife ecology in the greater St. Louis area.

The Whitney R. Harris World Ecology Center at the University of Missouri–St. Louis presented the Garden and the Zoo with the World Ecology Award in particular recognition of their longtime work in Madagascar.

Helina S. Woldekiros, an assistant professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences has a bone to pick with modernization: chickens are losing diversity.

The LEC announced funding for 8 biodiversity projects, including one in Africa earlier this week.

A study published July 8 in the journal Nature Plants presents a novel model for how small-seeded plants came to the table — and it relies on help from large, grazing animals, including bison. The new work is a collaboration between Natalie Mueller, assistant professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and Robert Spengler, director of the Paleoethnobotany Laboratories at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

Marine scientists predict climate change might severely hinder efforts to protect populations of the endangered and iconic Nassau grouper by the end of this century.

The world’s tropical forests lost roughly 39 million acres of trees last year, an area roughly the size of Bangladesh, according to a report Wednesday by Global Forest Watch that used new satellite data from the University of Maryland. Global Forest Watch is part of the World Resources Institute, an environmental group.

A World Resources Institute project aims to collect DNA samples from tree leaves and use it to help track illegal logging.

What we think we know about how to restore tropical forests is getting a second look. A new paper produced by scientists in Missouri Botanical Garden’s Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development (CCSD), the University of Hawaii’s Lyon Arboretum, and the University of Maryland Baltimore County points out an important bias in recent studies.