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

Ross was awarded a prize for his presentation on Leveraging machine learning to unveil phenological flowering patterns in South African National Botanical Gardens through public databases

Jonathan helping Saima Shikesho extract eDNA from herbivore dung in the lab at the Gobabeb Namib Research Institute, for a study on herbivore diet in the Namib Desert.

Part of the Podcast series with the African Centre for DNA Barcoding Podcast, Barnabas Daru discusses his research using phylogeny and his path the Stanford.

Jonathan Davies attended the authors meeting of the Global Environmental Outlook 7 (GEO-7) at the UN in Thailand, March 2023.

Interview with Jonathan in the first episode of the African Centre for DNA Barcoding Podcast, aired in February 2023, discussing some of the general issues facing biodiversity today.