New paper in Current Biology!

Robin put together this amazing graphical abstract — it gets the point across!

I’m super excited about the publication of the first paper from my postdoctoral research: Delayed flowering phenology of red-flowering plants in response to hummingbird migration. You can find it here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.03.035. It’s one of the featured articles in this issue, which is really exciting! It was a dream to work with collaborators Dr. Andrea Berardi (JMU) and my postdoctoral advisor Dr. Robin Hopkins (Harvard) who did wonders for connecting the dots between the pattern and the possible process, and for improving the quality of the analyses.

This project is the essence of what I always imagined being a scientist would feel like: fundamental discovery. We described for the first time that red and orange flowers appear later than all of the other colors in the eastern United States, agnostic to species identity. It seemed amazing that this hadn’t been noticed before, but it’s actually very difficult to characterize this phenomenon without access to massive datasets with good annotation. We used 1.6 million observations of plants that were in flower from iNaturalist, and we assigned flower color labels to each observation using a computer vision pipeline.

It isn’t just that red and orange flowers bloom later though — in this manuscript we also find that their flowering phenology aligns perfectly with the seasonal migration of hummingbirds. No coincidence: We know from decades of research that North American preferentially visit red and orange flowers! Our results suggest adaptation of flowering phenology of plants with red and orange flowers to the seasonal arrival of their hummingbird pollinators. But, more work needs to be done to test this explicitly!

Finally seeing this project out in the world is hugely satisfying — I have been dreaming up this analysis for years. During my Ph.D. there was a short phase in which I was trying to convince other grad students to help me manually label observations, and I actually presented on an early version of this project at Botany 2022 in Anchorage, AK during the “Germinating Ideas: Lightning Talks” session. At the time, though, I had much less data and the pattern of delayed flowering for red-flowering plants wasn’t as obvious.