Christopher Dick
chrisdick.bsky.social
Christopher Dick
@chrisdick.bsky.social
Prof of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of Michigan, plant curator at MICH, Director of E.S. George Reserve, research on trees, tropical forests; from the Allegheny Front in Pennsylvania
Thursday lab at the Mud Lake bog -- an exciting finale for a semester of field botany and marking the 60th anniversary of the "Woody Plants" class at @UMich @UMSEAS and #UMichEEB
November 7, 2025 at 1:01 PM
Reposted by Christopher Dick
My little blog is growing up 🥹 It's now The Antiquarian, a weekly newsletter exploring what we know about the past, how we learn it, and why it matters. theantiquarian.email/archive/welc...
Welcome to The Antiquarian
Because the past matters more than ever
theantiquarian.email
November 2, 2025 at 6:37 PM
Pleased to be hosting my earliest mentor in tropical field botany Michael Nee who will be speaking at the #MICH Herbarium tomorrow (Halloween, Friday, noon-1, Oct 31) on the "Origin of Pumpkins and Squashes". Members of the public are welcome
October 30, 2025 at 5:47 PM
Reposted by Christopher Dick
Many congratulations to Adriane Esquivel, Rebecca Morgan and to all our colleagues supporting Amazon forest monitoring with RAINFOR and ForestPlots.net!
Our analysis of 30 years of Amazon forest change is highlighted on the cover of @natplants.nature.com.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The October issue is now fully online:

www.nature.com/nplants/volu...
October 28, 2025 at 12:26 PM
Reposted by Christopher Dick
Great pair of articles in this morning's Ann Arbor News highlighting the outstanding new leadership of the U-M Museum of Zoology and U-M Herbarium: Alison Davis Rabosky (left) and Thais Vasconcelos (right). 🍄🌿🌺🐚🪲🐟🐸🐍🐦🐿️
October 18, 2025 at 2:36 PM
We are hiring a full time plant mounter to join our U-M herbarium team. The person will mount specimens from around the world and train students in the plant mounting process. Cool botanical job! careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...
PLANT MOUNTER II | U-M Careers
careers.umich.edu
October 14, 2025 at 2:40 PM
Michigan's #UMMZ Reptiles and Amphibians Collections Manager position is now open. Join a great museums group and help manage the world's second largest herpetology research collection. Please share! careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...
Res Museum Collection Manager | U-M Careers
careers.umich.edu
October 11, 2025 at 1:47 PM
Reposted by Christopher Dick
Critical part of the President's new $100,000 charge for H1-B visas: The Administration can also offer a $100,000 discount to any person, company, or industry that it wants. Replacing rules with arbitrary discretion.

Want visas? You know who to call and who to flatter.
September 20, 2025 at 1:40 PM
Reposted by Christopher Dick
Happy to share this commentary on our new paper in @pnas.org, led by William Farhan-Rios, exploring responses of tropical tree communities to climate warming from the Amazon to Andes Mountains 🌴 ⛰️ 🌐

An uphill struggle for tropical forest trees | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
September 19, 2025 at 7:43 PM
Reposted by Christopher Dick
Excited to share a new paper! "Sorting of ancestral polymorphism and its impact on morphological phylogenetics and macroevolution". Part of some work I've been doing on modelling the evolution of polymorphic traits in fossil echinoderms.

academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...
Sorting of ancestral polymorphism and its impact on morphological phylogenetics and macroevolution
Abstract. Intraspecific phenotypic variation provides the basic substrate upon which the evolutionary processes that give rise to morphological innovation,
academic.oup.com
September 5, 2025 at 5:43 PM
Reposted by Christopher Dick
MSU Plant Bio is hiring a new herbarium director! Our herbarium is a wonderful resource on campus and I'm excited to have the opportunity to make it even better by bringing in a new director. Details here: plantbiology.natsci.msu.edu/job-postings...
plantbiology.natsci.msu.edu
August 21, 2025 at 3:01 PM
Reposted by Christopher Dick
Come join us in Corvallis! Great colleagues, a wonderful location for plant science of all types, with the added benefit of the beautiful surroundings of Oregon!
Herbarium director position opening at Oregon State University ‪@osu-herbarium.bsky.social‬ Great opportunity for herbarium- and field-trained botanists at any rank. bpp.oregonstate.edu/bpp/about/op...
Open Positions
bpp.oregonstate.edu
July 9, 2025 at 6:59 PM
Following the fantastic #ATBC2025 meeting in Oaxaca I visited the Tree of Tule, a Montezuma cypress (Taxodium mucronatum) with the world's stoutest trunk. It's highly buttressed but even after smoothing it is thicker than the largest sequoia with a smoothed diameter of 30.8 feet. #bigtrees
July 9, 2025 at 3:08 PM
Herbarium director position opening at Oregon State University ‪@osu-herbarium.bsky.social‬ Great opportunity for herbarium- and field-trained botanists at any rank. bpp.oregonstate.edu/bpp/about/op...
Open Positions
bpp.oregonstate.edu
July 9, 2025 at 2:53 PM
Reposted by Christopher Dick
Heading to Oaxaca for #ATBC2025 ? Make sure you stop by our symposium for all things leaf temperature, heat tolerance, and tradeoffs across climate gradients 🌿💧🌡️
June 26, 2025 at 10:04 PM
Reposted by Christopher Dick
#NExTropics symposia at #ATBC2025 find out the latest from nutrient addition experiments from across the tropics
See you in Oaxaca next week for the 61ˢᵗ Annual Meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC). Check out our symposium on nutrient addition experiments across tropical forestshttps://www.atbc2025.org/symposia/s-75 @kmander7.bsky.social
Nutrient addition EXperiments in TROPICal Forests (NEXTropics): Synthesizing nutrient limitations across the tropics | ATBC2025
www.atbc2025.org
June 27, 2025 at 2:22 AM
Reposted by Christopher Dick
#ATBC2025 started. More than 1000 participants are in the room.
June 29, 2025 at 10:22 PM
I'll be talking about hyperdominant tropical tree species at #ATBC2025 in #Oaxaca, including some recent work on Eschweilera coriacea, which despite being possibly the most common tropical tree in the world (~5 billion trees in the Amazon basin) can be hard to identify and is poorly studied.
June 29, 2025 at 1:58 PM
Reposted by Christopher Dick
To Whomever vandalized the Peony Garden at the Nichols Arboretum at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor last night:

There is so little beauty in our world right now. You are making the world a more cruel and ugly place. You are not helping.

www.instagram.com/reel/DKXFSz5...
Login • Instagram
Welcome back to Instagram. Sign in to check out what your friends, family & interests have been capturing & sharing around the world.
www.instagram.com
June 1, 2025 at 2:34 PM
Reposted by Christopher Dick
This is an absolute disaster. If we don't stop this, they will turn NSF into a pawn of the Trump administration. There will be no research on climate, biodiversity, or anything that isn't eugenics or AI or how to more efficiently destroy the planet for profit.

This cannot be allowed to happen.
Exclusive: NSF faces radical shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions
Changes seen as a response to presidential directives on what research to fund
www.science.org
May 9, 2025 at 3:42 AM
Reposted by Christopher Dick
The legendary USGS Bee Lab is being shut down. The 2026 budget proposal defunds the Ecosystem Mission Area, which supported the lab. If their science helped your work, there’s still time to make your voice heard. Read below. (1/4)
🧪 #pollinators #Pollinators #USGS #Entomology #Hymenoptera 🪲🪳
USGS Bee Lab at the Eastern Ecological Science Center
The USGS Bee Lab supports research on native bees. As part of that program we and our co-located USFWS partners develop identification tools and keys for native bee species, take public access hi reso...
www.usgs.gov
May 8, 2025 at 6:20 PM
I continue to be awed by the Blanding's turtles at the ES George reserve #ESGR. A U-M grad student first tagged them in 1953. At 95 years old, our oldest marked female shows no sign of aging and reproduces with as much vigor as a 20 yr old! lsa.umich.edu/herbarium/ne...
The World's Oldest Known Freshwater Turtle Turns 95 | U-M LSA University of Michigan Herbarium
A female Blanding’s turtle, it sets a new record with each year of life. And this turtle doesn’t appear to be slowing down. In fact, she is still producing eggs, and shows no signs of declining with a...
lsa.umich.edu
May 7, 2025 at 12:31 PM
Spring newsletter from the U-M Museum of Zoology #UMMZ and Herbarium #MICH (EEB museums) with a story from the ES George Reserve #ESGR on our elderly Blanding's turtles
lsa.umich.edu/eeb/alumni-f...
EEB Museums Newsletters | U-M LSA Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB)
lsa.umich.edu
May 7, 2025 at 12:20 PM