Jonathan tries to convince PhD student Nthabeleng Nhlengethwa that this is really how ecologists sample vegetation. Nthabeleng is unimpressed. In collaboration with Vanessa Ezenwa (Yale) and Danny Govender (SANParks), Nthabeleng will use eDNA from buffalo dung to examine whether buffalo infected with TB shift their dietary preferences. Do sick buffalo self-medicate or do they simply…

Selected by an expert jury led by Enrique Martínez Meyer of the GBIF Science Committee, Ross won the award for his work combining DNA barcoding data on flying insects with phenological data on flowering plants to explore how climate change may be changing the timing of interactions between species across South Africa. His research represents…

Contributing to the Global Malaise Program coordinated through the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics, University of Guelph. Setting up a new Malaise trap to capture flying insects on the edge of the Kalahari desert with the help of Eugene Marais, Research Manager, Gobabeb Namib Research Institute. Photo credit to Ross Stewart, PhD student African Centre for…

Using a new machine learning tool – Convolutional Kitchen Sinks – Avery shows how it is possible to learn the evolutionary model on which species have been filtered into communities just from observations of their community membership. One of my favourite paper titles. Interested in Convolutional Kitchen Sinks? Make sure to check out Avery’s kitchen…

Intergovernmental reports have drawn focus to the escalating climate and biodiversity crises and the connections between them, but interactions among all three pressures have been largely overlooked. We show how considering the full suite of connections would be transformative for planetary health by identifying potential for co-benefits and mutually beneficial scenarios, and highlighting where a…

Isidora Silva-Valderrama received first prize for a student presentation at the APS Pacific Division Annual Meeting, Oregon US. Here she is with her co-supervisor José Ramón Úrbez Torres from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, don’t they look happy! Congratulations Isidora.

Using mathematical models from the disease ecology literature, we show how pathogen escape may provide an additional ‘economy of scale’ selecting for seed masting via the removal of pathogens from the system in non-mast years through density-dependent dynamics. Read the full paper online now in Current Biology. I think this is one of my favourite…

Jonathan catches up with long-time collaborator and colleague Kowiyou Yessoufou at the University of Johannesburg as part of the African Centre for DNA Barcoding podcast series. Jonathan and Kowiyou discuss biodiversity science and the importance of bioinformatic training in South Africa. This was followed by an animated debate on geopolitics in Africa, (un)fortunately not recorded!

Nick and Avery attended the 11th Biennial meeting of the International Biogeography Society in Prague. Lucky them! Kudos to Avery for structuring his poster in the form of a phylogenetic tree.

From host to host: The taxonomic and geographic expansionof Botryosphaeriaceae (Fungal Biology Reviews 48 (2024) 100352). Here, we explore the factors that shape host breadth of plant pathogens within Botryosphaeriaceae, a fungal family associated with several devastating diseases in economically important crops