The first publication from a system that we’ve been developing for the past few years is out this week in Early View at New Phytologist! The paper describes the natural variation in flowering, its response to photoperiod cues, and drought-related traits we find across annual populations of the common monkeyflower.

This is the yield of my best collection trip to date, criss-crossing up and down the mountains in California and Oregon, plus many painstaking hours of scoring plants for many traits by myself, Anna, Morgan Oh (a high school summer researcher!), and our collaborator Jack Colicchio at Kansas. However, it would not have come together if not for in depth, expert statistical analysis by Nic. We’ve found some really interesting patterns of evolution. For instance, flowering time and the photoperiod required to induce flowering vary along different geographic axes, suggesting they evolve in response to different selective pressures even though they are part of an integrated seasonal flowering schedule. In addition, we find evidence that different drought adaptation strategies are not evolutionarily mutually exclusive. Check it out! [Kooyers et al.]