After all the fieldwork in summer, fall was about crunching deeply into data analyses, paper and proposal writing… we have some exciting results to share about Merianieae diversification in the Neotropics from the modelling project with Stacey Smith and Laura Lagomarsino – with different roles of biogeographic background, climatic niche evolution and biotic niche shifts between Andean and non-Andean clades! I hope to share the paper soon!
Also, my undergraduate student Ash Kerber and I made efforts to dig into our Rhexia results and Ash gave a fantastic (first!!) conference talk at the local GREEBS meeting at the Rocky Mountain Research Station of CU Boulder at the end of September… she has also been funded by CU Boulder to mount and identify all the bees we have collected – turns out that there were only two bumblebee species at our nine sites upon close examination – morphological variability can be so misleading sometimes!