Matthew Austin
Curator of Biodiversity Data Herbarium, Missouri Botanical Garden
Now
Curator of Biodiversity Data
Herbarium
Missouri Botanical Garden
Research Interests: Biological responses to global change, leveraging natural history collections for ecological research and conservation, automating trait extraction from digitized specimens, plant-pollinator ecology
At LEC
Postdoctoral Fellow
Years: 2020-2023
Mentor(s): Adam Smith (Missouri Botanical Garden) and Kenneth Olsen (WashU)
Research Focus: Integrating specimen-based science with data-intensive modeling approaches to study how species respond to global change. A key theme is how natural history collections can be leveraged as sources of long-term ecological data.
Publications related to postdoctoral work
Austin, M.W., P.O. Cole, K.M. Olsen & A.B. Smith. (2022). Climate change is associated with increased allocation to potential outcrossing in a common mixed mating species. American Journal of Botany 109: 1085–1096. doi: 10.1002/ajb2.16021
Austin, M.W. & A.S. Dunlap. (2023). Resource availability affects seasonal trajectories of population-level learning. American Naturalist. doi: 10.1086/722235
Austin, Matthew & Miller-Struttmann, Nicole. (2024). An inquiry-based activity for investigating the effect of climate change on phenology using the R programming language. The American Biology Teacher. 86. 233-241. 10.1525/abt.2024.86.4.233
Austin MW, Smith AB, Olsen KM, Hoch PC, Krakos KN, Schmocker SP, Miller‐Struttmann NE (2024). Climate change increases flowering duration, driving phenological reassembly and elevated co‐flowering richness. New Phytologist, 243(6). doi:10.1111/nph.19994
Austin, M.W., A.D. Tripodi, J.P. Strange & A.S. Dunlap. (2022). Bumble bees exhibit body size clines across an urban gradient despite low genetic differentiation. Scientific Reports 12: 4166. doi:10.1038/s41598-022-08093-4
Bartlett KB, Austin MW, Beck JB, Zanne AE, Smith AB. (2023). Beyond the usual climate? Factors determining flowering and fruiting phenology across a genus over 117 years. American Journal of Botany. 110(7):e16188. doi: 10.1002/ajb2.16188
Manning, T.H., M.W. Austin, K. MuseMorris & A.S. Dunlap. (2021). Equivalent learning, but unequal participation: male bumble bees learn comparably to females, but participate in cognitive assessments at lower rates. Behavioural Processes 193: 104528. doi:10.1016/j.beproc.2021.104528