✨ Paper spotlight ✨

(🧵 1/3) Evolution of petal patterning: blooming floral diversity at the microscale
nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

EDGE Fellowship 2026 OPEN!
 £10,000+ grant & 28-month program for early-career conservationists protecting unique threatened species 👇

New research from my lab @newphyt.bsky.social! Using the plant family #Melastomataceae, we show that colonization of novel #mountain environments commonly preceded and likely drove #pollinator shifts away from bee pollination! doi.org/10.1111/nph....

Alvord et al. 2025 @jxbotany.bsky.social show that #turgor pressure is important to maintain the functionality of #buzz-pollinated flowers - see our commentary on their paper! doi.org/10.1093/jxb/...

Great to be at the #FutureforButterflies. Tomorrow I will speak about this new paper and our work with #biodiversitymonitoring using #Insect #cameratraps and #AI as part of @mambo-project.eu @onestop-project.eu and @insectai.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...?

Thank you @botsocamerica.bsky.social for featuring our research! We had a great, scientifically stimulating review experience at AJB, thanks to the editor and reviewers! And guess what - the global distribution of #flower and #fruit #colors shows strong links with temperature and UV-B irradiance!

Thinking about devastating cuts to NSF: US gov-funded science has been the engine upon which most of the tech wealth was generated. But the oligarchs (currently hoarding much of that $) think it’s their own brilliance & not the accident of standing close to the scientific engine that made them rich.

I couldn't be reading a more inspiring paper after spending a month in the rainforests of Madagascar and Borneo training students on #Melastomataceae reproductive biology: doi.org/10.3417/2025...
@erc.europa.eu #MountBuzz #pollination

New paper alert! Zombie fires overwinter, going underground to smolder through winter before reemerging. Until recently, we knew these fires occurred but knew little of their ecological or carbon impacts. Along with my amazing coauthors, we set out to change this. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ep. 2 of Plant People Season 2 is LIVE—and this week we’re talking something that’s on everyone’s radar: food. 🎧🍎

Join @alexmcalvay.bsky.social and John de la Parra as they chat about problems in modern agriculture (like monocrops!) that are threatening food security. www.nybg.org/plantpeople/...

JA @ijpsjournal.bsky.social

Characterizing the frequency, morphological gradient, and distribution of dioecy in Miconia (Melastomataceae)

Juan C. Angulo, Janelle M. Burke, Fabián A. Michelangeli

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

#PlantScience

The sequential direct and indirect effects of mountain uplift, climatic niche and floral trait evolution on diversification dynamics in an Andean plant clade

Agnes S Dellinger, Laura Lagomarsino, Fabián Michelangeli, Stefan Dullinger, Stacey D Smith

academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

Good news, Altmetric has now started watching BlueSky for mentions of publications. And by the way, provides an easy comparison between this and the old site for a recent preprint of mine which I posted simultaneousl at both. Numbers speak by themselves !

[new paper] You probably suspected that loss of pollinator diversity consistently reduces reproductive success for wild and cultivated plants, but here we quantify it: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hopefully this gets people thinking about the origins of life's thermal optimisation. I'm also super excited about this study - it's probably one of the most "stretchy" projects I've ever worked on, but great fun!