Botany 2025 in Palm Springs

I spent the last week of July in Palm Springs, CA for the annual Botany conference. It was inspiring to see new research progress from systematics to taxonomy to speciation. I usually alternate between Evolution and Botany conferences during the summers — I really love Botany because the organismal focus of the talks is so prominent. So many of the presentations put the beauty of biodiversity front and center.

I gave an oral presentation and a poster presentation. My oral presentation was in the colloquium “Plant phenology in an era of rapid global change: new perspectives and frontiers“ and presented on our recent finding of delayed flowering phenology of red-flowering plants in the eastern U.S.

My poster ended up being a two-in-one: completely separate projects united by the theme of using iNaturalist to advance natural history research. They complemented each other really well, actually. On one side, we had a super high-throughput approach to phenotype Monarda fistulosa. On the other side, we had a highly targeted approach focused on a single observation of a Monarda in western Mexico that turned out to represent the rediscovery of Monarda mexicana.