At a recent outreach event someone asked me: “Where is the most biodiverse region for macrofungi in the U.S.?”

I had a hunch… but then remembered we have herbarium and community-science data to answer this (via GBIF).

So I mapped it out.

Behold: U.S. macrofungal biodiversity, four metrics. 🍄🗺️

While making some outreach materials, I discovered that the latest GenAI image models can create mushroom images that are now good enough to fool computer vision models (like iNaturalist). ChatGPT made these with "hyper realistic" and "cinematic lighting" instructions. Honestly, I'm blown away.

FYI ChatGPT update is very good at scientific vectorized illustrations. I did spend a few hours cleaning them up in Inkscape, but it would’ve taken me days to do this on my own… check it out!

Graduating during the pandemic slowed down my process and is part of why I did two postdocs. Now as a first year faculty, all the federal grants are frozen. I love the work I do but this has all of us questioning how much www.science.org/content/arti...

"I’m feeling betrayed, gutted, lost, anxious, and furious."

Our story for @science.org—on the ongoing mass firing of federal employees and reactions in the scientific community.

www.science.org/content/arti...

I’m seeing an awful lot of posts from people on Bluesky responding to despairing scientists with the words “please keep going, the world needs you”.

Scientists cannot keep going if we can’t keep a roof over our heads and our mouths fed.

If you need some positive science in your feed, check out @nerdychristie.bsky.social’s piece about how we can use #conservation dogs to find fungal diversity, inspired by the first #truffle paper my sister and I co-authored.

www.science.org/content/arti...

🧪🌎 #mycology @ecol-evol.bsky.social

My first #MLO #CRISPR edited hop plantlets! Small, but growing fast! For being the same treatment/cultivar combination, they sure look different — hope they make it to PM phenotyping 🤞.