Tag: biology

Climate change is super-charging St. Louis wildflowers (Links to an external site)

The wildflowers that bring a burst of color to meadows and forests across St. Louis are blooming later and longer than they did in previous decades, according to a study led by researchers with the Living Earth Collaborative, a signature initiative of the Arts & Sciences Strategic Plan. The study by Missouri Botanical Garden’s Matthew Austin and Ken Olsen, the George William and Irene Koechig Freiberg Professor of Biology is published in New Phytologist.

Citizen scientists gather eDNA in water samples for global biodiversity census (Links to an external site)

As part of the UN’s International Day of Biodiversity, Kara Andres, a postdoctoral fellow with the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis, collected samples of water from Simpson Lake, in Valley Park, Mo., as part of a coordinated global effort to use environmental DNA—genetic material shed by organisms into the environment—to document the current state of biodiversity.

If I never knew you (Links to an external site)

A barrier range dragon (Ctenophorus mirrityana) sunning on red dirt

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.

Bison overlooked in domestication of grain crops (Links to an external site)

A buffalo stands in a dry grass

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.