February and March, 2026

Summary

• From March 2 to 6, Sean attended a research symposium held at the Lithuanian Institute of Forestry, focused on the genetic indicator approach. The workshop was a part of the GENOA project, a four year European funded networking project that will advance new tools and training events for genetic diversity conservation.
• On March 11, Emma gave a presentation on our butternut tree (a native, threatened tree species impacted by a fungal disease) research, stewardship, and gene conservation efforts for the Forest Preserve District of Cook County’s Department of Resource Management. There were ~65 people in attendance including regional ecologists, arborists, and educators.
• At the end of March, Catherine (current RaMP student) is leading a ~12 day expedition to collect community and ecological data from an increasingly well studied population of the threatened butternut tree, in Vermont.  She will be recording the size and species of trees surrounding butternut trees to assess how the associated vegetation community could compete with or facilitate butternut trees, impacting their health.  She will also interview land managers about their past habitat management practices, and will use this to test how management impacts regeneration of seedlings, which is rare for this species.  Catherine will be working with a private landowner, a local park, and several USFS colleagues.
• Selu recently completed a 10 week lab rotation at The Morton Arboretum and Chicago Botanic Garden (with colleagues Jeremie Fant and Marne Quigg). She learned about DNA extractions, DNA data processing, and past work on elms at the two institutions. She also gathered information on available germplasm that can be used in a future greenhouse or field experiment to understand variability in phenology, physiology, or Dutch elm disease resistance within the species.

Publications

• Schumacher, E.K., Evans, M., Hamilton, A., Westwood, M. and Hoban, S., 2026. Is hybridization an important consideration for ex situ conservation? A case study using parentage in white oaks at The Morton Arboretum. Free Open access https://doi.org/10.1086/739819
  • Plants held in botanic gardens have the opportunity to mate with closely related species, resulting in hybrid offspring, and yet hybridization in these collections has rarely been scientifically assessed. Accounting for hybridization is important because gardens frequently share seeds with each other. Hybrid offspring may exhibit traits different from the parental species, impacting their survival in different environmental conditions. In this study, including work by Ash, Mikaely, and Emily Schumacher (a lab alumnus), we tested for hybridization in offspring of Quercus muehlenbergii at The Morton Arboretum using DNA analysis. About 8% of offspring were hybrids; very similar to a study by Andrew Hipp and colleagues a few years ago in other species in the oak collection. About half of pollination distances exceeded 100 m, and one pollination distance exceeded 600 m. We also found a very high degree of mating between siblings (thus, inbreeding), which also has implications for the use of seeds in botanic gardens. We conclude that a nonnegligible proportion of seeds produced in botanic gardens may be hybrids. Our findings also show that botanic gardens are useful laboratories to study mechanisms underlying species’ boundaries
• Schmidt, C., Hoban, S., Leigh, D.M., Jetz, W. and Garroway, C.J., 2026. Variability, Drivers, and Utility of Genetic Diversity‐Area Relationships in Terrestrial Vertebrates. Ecology Letters, 29(1), p.e70306. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.70306
  • This paper addresses a conservation policy need, which is to understand losses in genetic diversity (an element of biodiversity) with simple and quick metrics.  One proposed metric, developed in 2022 by Exposito et al. in the context of the Convention on Biological Diversity, is based on species range area that has been lost, e.g. due to habitat loss.  This paper tests the degree to which genetic changes can be predicted from habitat changes, and whether the rate of loss can be predicted by species’ traits.  The paper shows that area-based prediction of genetic diversity is not very accurate, meaning that other metrics need to be developed for quantifying genetic diversity conservation.