2025 Molecular Ecology Prize goes to Rosemary Gillespie, for harnessing molecular phylogenetics to understand community assembly and ecology

Tetragnatha quasimodo, a Hawai’an “stretch spider” named by Prof. Gillespie. (iNaturalist, Tony Iwane)

The Molecular Ecology Prize Committee has announced the 2025 recipient of the award, which recognizes an outstanding scientist who has made significant contributions to the still-young field of molecular ecology:

The Molecular Ecology Prize Committee is pleased to announce that the 2025 Molecular Ecology Prize has been awarded to Dr. Rosemary G. Gillespie, who is an evolutionary biologist and professor of Environmental Science at the University of California, Berkeley.  Professor Gillespie has profoundly shaped the field of molecular ecology through her pioneering research, visionary leadership, and dedicated mentorship. Her interdisciplinary work bridges evolutionary biology, island biogeography, community ecology, and molecular genetics, addressing fundamental questions about biodiversity and adaptation. She has illuminated key mechanisms of species diversification and ecological community assembly, particularly in arthropods. Her seminal 2004 Science paper on Hawaiian spiders used molecular phylogenetics to demonstrate that adaptive radiation can structure ecological communities through in situ diversification—an influential contribution that now stands as a cornerstone of community and evolutionary ecology. Through decades of work in the Hawaiian archipelago, Dr. Gillespie’s research has set a benchmark for applying molecular tools to unravel complex ecological and evolutionary processes. Beyond her scholarship, she has been a dedicated leader and advocate for the molecular ecology community, notably through her long-standing editorial service to the journal Molecular Ecology.

Professor  Gillespie  joins the previous winners of the Molecular Ecology Prize: Godfrey Hewitt, John Avise, Pierre Taberlet, Harry Smith, Terry Burke, Josephine Pemberton, Deborah Charlesworth, Craig Moritz, Laurent Excoffier, Johanna Schmitt, Fred Allendorf, Louis Bernatchez, Nancy Moran, Robin Waples, Scott Edwards, Victoria Sork, Fuwen Wei, Kerstin Johannessen, Uma Ramakrishnan, and Michael Whitlock.

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2025 Harry Smith Prize awarded to Óscar Romero-Báez for landscape genomics work that “sets a new standard”

Sceloporus grammicus (WikiMedia Commons, Charles J. Sharp)

The 2025 Harry Smith Prize, which recognizes the best paper published in Molecular Ecology or Molecular Ecology Resources in the previous year by an early career scholar, has been awarded to Óscar Romero-Báez, a doctoral student at the Institute of Ecology at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and his co-authors for their paper “Environmental and anthropogenic factors mediating the functional connectivity of the mesquite lizard along the eastern Trans-Mexican Volcanic”.

The Harry Smith Prize Committee, which included previous Harry Smith Prize winners or runners-up Antonino Malacrinò, Angel Rivera-Colon, and Jana Wold, wrote in their decision announcement:

Romero-Báez et al. investigated how human-altered landscapes affect the functional connectivity of a widely distributed lizard, Sceloporus grammicus, in Mexico’s eastern Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt. Using genomic data and landscape analysis, the study found significant genetic differentiation across the region but also evidence of gene flow over long distances, despite the species’ low mobility. Key environmental factors influencing connectivity included air and substrate temperature, humidity, and aspect. Agricultural areas surprisingly supported connectivity, while forest cover and roads had mixed effects depending on scale. More broadly, the authors’ rigorous use of gravity models, spatial statistics, and ecological data sets a new standard for landscape genetics in reptiles, and offers important insights for biodiversity conservation in human-modified landscapes.

The winning article is available Open Access at the Molecular Ecology website.

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“Association scans” are just the first step to understanding local adaptation

A rare glamour shot of Arabidopsis thaliana flowers (Flickr, Steffen Geyer)

Genotype-environment association is one of the most fundamental phenomena of landscape genomics. A species’ adaptation to its environment should mean that populations of the same species in different environments will evolve different frequencies of genetic variants that support adaptation to those different environments. So in principle, we should be able to find those locally adaptive genetic variants by “scanning” through many places in the genome to find the ones where individuals from different environments carry different variants.

There’s a catch, of course. Actually several. Isolation-by-distance and founder effects can mean that populations evolve genetic differences just as a consequence of being in different places. Even when you control for those effects, so-called genotype-environment association (GEA) is just that — an association. You can’t know for sure that a genetic locus showing a pattern of GEA has a functional relationship to traits that facilitate adaptation without independent data showing that function. A recent preprint reports a project in which plant geneticists did just that, performing experimental validation on GEA candidate loci, and they found a lot of those candidate loci don’t seem to hold up.

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Local boy makes op-ed

Chicory, Cichorium intybus, which always makes me think of Mr. Longenecker’s biology class wildflower walks (Flickr, jby)

Here’s a new one for my publications list: the Op-Ed pages of my hometown newspaper. I’ve spent the last weeks calling my congressional reps, and hassling other people to do the same, over the Trump administration’s vandalism of research funding (alongside its vandalism of just about every other function of the federal government), but it’s hardly felt like enough. One new option presented when I happened across Science Homecoming, a project to recruit scientists to speak out in support of federal research agencies in the newspapers of towns where they grew up. As Science Homecoming points out, local newspapers continue to have a huge audience across the country, and that’s an opportunity to reach people where they live, with stories that show how the current crisis impacts their local communities.

So I looked up the opinion section editor at LNP/LancasterOnline, the modern incarnation of the paper my parents have subscribed to since I was old enough to read it, which serves central Pennsylvania. I emailed her a pitch that I’d put together following Science Homecoming’s suggestions, and she wrote back to ask for a full column almost immediately. (The topic was already very much on the editorial staff’s radar.) A bit more than a week later, my column is online and in print, alongside a parallel piece from two geoscientists with local roots, on the front page of the Sunday Perspectives section. 

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Nominations open for the 2025 Harry Smith Prize, recognizing early career research published in Molecular Ecology

The editorial board of the journal Molecular Ecology is seeking nominations for the Harry Smith Prize, which recognizes the best paper published in Molecular Ecology or Molecular Ecology Resources in the previous calendar year (2024) by graduate students or early career scholars with no more than five years of postdoctoral or fellowship experience. The prize comes with a cash award of US$1000 and an announcement in the journal and in The Molecular Ecologist.  The winner will also be asked to join a junior editorial board for the journal to offer advice on changing research needs and potentially serve as a guest editor. The winner of this annual prize is selected by the junior editorial board.

The prize is named after Professor Harry Smith FRS, who founded Molecular Ecology and served as both Chief and Managing Editor during the journal’s critical early years. He continued as the journal’s Managing Editor until 2008, and he went out of his way to encourage early career scholars. In addition to his editorial work, Harry was one of the world’s foremost researchers in photomorphogenesis, where he determined how plants respond to shading, leading to concepts such as “neighbour detection” and “shade avoidance,” which are fundamental to understanding plant responses to crowding and competition. More broadly his research provided an early example of how molecular data could inform ecology, and in 2008 he was awarded the Molecular Ecology Prize that recognized both his scientific and editorial contributions to the field.

Please send a PDF of the paper you are nominating, with a short supporting statement (no more than 250 words; longer submissions will not be accepted) directly to molecol.social@gmail.com by Friday 25 April 2025. Self-nominations are encouraged.

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Nominations open for the 2025 Molecular Ecology Prize

From the Molecular Ecology Prize Committee:

We are soliciting nominations for the annual Molecular Ecology Prize.

The field of molecular ecology is young and inherently interdisciplinary. As a consequence, research in molecular ecology is not currently represented by a single scientific society, so there is no body that actively promotes the discipline or recognizes its pioneers. The editorial board of the journal Molecular Ecology therefore created the Molecular Ecology Prize in order to fill this void, and recognize significant contributions to this area of research. The prize selection committee is independent of the journal and its editorial board.

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The creationists are winning. Here’s what we scientists can do about it

Clouds over Life Sciences South at the University of Idaho, where I earned my PhD. (Flickr, jby)

In my first year of graduate school at the University of Idaho, I joined a bunch of my colleagues in the audience of a debate staged between an evolutionary biologist and a creationist. I remember almost nothing of the debate’s specifics. The creationist held up largely by talking past his opponent, and the audience discussion after featured howlers like the suggestion that the almighty intelligent designer had, as an indication of his power, arranged the sun and the moon so they appear to be the same size as viewed from Earth. (They demonstrably do not.) None of it felt particularly threatening. My gang of biologists and biologists-in-training went for drinks afterward at one of the less-fratty bars near campus, in a more or less uniform mood of self-assurance.

Well.

That creationist was on the faculty of a little religious college that had its campus in downtown Moscow, Idaho, within a block of the bar where we were took our after-debate party. The college is one ministry of a church founded in Moscow by the creationist’s brother, in pursuit of an effort to “reconstruct” the U.S. into his vision of theocracy, modeled on the slaveholding Confederate South. That effort is now a nationwide network of home-schoolers, religious schools, and churches — including a congregation that counts among its members the current nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.

So much for that self-assurance.

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Notes from Asilomar, 2025

A sanderling, Calidris alba, probing the tide line at Asilomar State Beach (jby)

Driving up to Monterey from southern California is lovely enough to make me almost enjoy driving. Highway 1, just two lanes of traffic right at the edge of the continent, pays for its clifftop views of the Pacific with frequent closure for landslides. But even the more inland route of the US-101 highway takes in sweeping ocean views from Ventura to Pismo Beach, interspersed with and then replaced by rolling hills of oak savannah. Even when those give way to pasture and a distressingly large roadside oil field, there’s still the jumbled rocky towers of Pinnacles National Park beckoning (if not visible) from the exit at Soledad — and then you cut of the highway and wind through green farmland and increasingly expensive-looking housing tracts and golf courses until you arrive in the town where John Steinbeck partied with bums and dockworkers and a cantankerous marine biologist most of a century ago, looking out over rocky coast to the wide ocean.

That drive is something of a seasonal ritual for me, thanks to the American Society of Naturalists’ biennial meeting. ASN is perpetually trying to find an alternate location, ideally east of the Mississippi, to host their standalone scientific conference in rotation. But so far no one has come up with a better spot than the Asilomar conference center. It’s a former YWCA campground, with gorgeous Arts and Crafts halls surrounded by comfortable hotel-style lodging, built among dunes studded with Monterey pines and within earshot of the beach. Even in January it’s a great place to “go be biologists” between scientific talks, as ASN President Dan Bolnick exhorted everyone in his welcome address the first night. Deer wander through the conference grounds fearlessly, and warblers flit through the trees. Jogging up the beach trail into town I saw harbor seals, sea lions, and a sea otter; one morning I got out early with my camera and snapped photos of shorebirds foraging in the wet sand at the tide line.

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Some science books for 2024

“Picton Library” (Flickr, Karen)

The Molecular Ecologist receives a small commission for purchases made on Bookshop.org via links from this post.

One minor personal accomplishment I scored this year is that it’s the first year since I started tracking, fully a decade ago, in which I’ve gotten through more than 20 purely extracurricular books. It’s not been easy, between the volume of text I work through as an academic and the propensity of social media to keep me focused on works that are, at most, long-form essays and articles. Still, one in particular thing cracked the code this year, and that was letting myself use audiobooks.

Swapping audiobooks in for podcasts on my running workouts opened up hours of book time every week, from narrative fiction to more science-adjacent stuff. It also turned out to come in handy for fieldwork trips, and I spent a lot of time driving out to the desert with a car-ful of students to survey Joshua tree populations. I signed up for a one-book-a-month membership at Libro.fm, where purchases benefit an independent bookstore of my choice — and which partners with the similarly bookseller-supporting Bookshop.org, where The Molecular Ecologist is an affiliate — and that’s proven to be about right for my consumption rate.

Adding more books to my media rotation has been good for my blood pressure in another year of frequently sad and frustrating and outright frightening news, and it’s put me in touch with some great science communicators. Here are some science books (and one that is at best science-adjacent) that I read or listened to this year, and which are, I think, each well worth your time — and maybe helpful if you’re still filling in the cracks of a holiday gift-giving list.

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Coming to PAG 32 this January? Join the first-ever Molecular Ecology workshop

Posted on behalf of Loren Rieseburg and Shawn Narum, workshop organizers.

We are pleased to announce the inaugural workshop for Molecular Ecology at the Plant & Animal Genomics (PAG) conference. The field of Molecular Ecology has been revolutionized by advances in genomics and computational biology that have enabled us to test hypotheses that were previously unanswerable. Topics that may be addressed in the workshop include the following: ecological genomics, ecological interactions, molecular adaptation, environmental nucleic acids, behavioural genomics, population and conservation genomics, epigenomics, and speciation and hybridization.

Email your abstract by November 12, 2024 to Loren Rieseberg/Shawn Narum to be considered for an oral presentation (loren.rieseberg@botany.ubc.ca; shawnn@uidaho.edu)

This initial workshop will include four invited speakers plus presentations from contributed speakers. Contributed oral presentations will be selected from abstracts submitted to the workshop by November 12, 2024. This workshop aims to bring together researchers, students, and practitioners in the field to explore how recent advances in genomics and molecular biology can be integrated with theory, concepts, and approaches of organismal biology.

Join us January 14, 2025 (10:30 AM-12:40 PM) in San Diego, CA!

For questions regarding abstracts, please contact Loren Rieseberg (loren.rieseberg@botany.ubc.caor Shawn Narum (shawnn@uidaho.edu).

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