February 2022

• The Tree Conservation Biology team is growing!  Sean Hoban will advise a PhD student through the University of Chicago starting this fall. Josephine Robertson, graduate of University of Vermont, is an exciting addition to our team!  She has experience in botany, forestry, and plant biology, and is excited to better understand species’ geographic range boundaries, adaptation within populations, and how rare and common species differ.

• Dr. Antonio Castilla Alvarez, in collaboration with the Hoban lab, began library preparation and RADseq on ~480 Q. havardii individuals and possible hybrid species. The main questions of this project will be focused on determining where the species boundaries may be drawn among populations of the species and between other possible hybrid species. Many of these individuals were collected by former research assistants Bethany Zumwalde and Emma Spence, as well as members of the Morton Arboretum Hipp lab and external collaborators. This sampling effort was largely assembled by current research Emily Schumacher (see picture for all of the DNA boxes used!) and you can read about Antonio's lab work on his Twitter (here, here, here).