UC Berkeley's biodiversity repositories & informatics services
The Annual Meeting of the Willi Hennig Society will take place May 26-31 at UC Berkeley’s Clark Kerr campus with tours of the natural history museums on campus! Hosted by the BNHM museums of UCMP, MVZ, Essig, and UC & Jepson Herbaria, this conference of Phylogenetics and Evolution has contributed talks and symposia that are aimed broadly and deeply. Visit the meeting website for details and area information. See you there!
We had an informal event tonight to give students an opportunity to meet some of the staff of the six natural history museums on campus, and learn all the students opportunities.
Here’s our presentation; come and get involved!
On Wednesday, April 25th, Sara Kahanamoku-Snelling (UCMP graduate student who started the petition) gathered comments from the Change.org petition and sent a more formal letter to Chancellor Christ which you can read below.
As of this writing, Thursday morning, April 26th, there are close to 3,500 signatures on the online petition to show campus administrators the broad support and impact Berkeley Natural History Museums and field stations have had and currently have.
Please keep up the message to Chancellor Christ, Provost Alivisatos, and others that we cannot endure without their support, that dramatic budget cuts on top of the steady erosion of funding jeopardize our traditions and eliminate a critically needed and unique resource for UC Berkeley and most importantly for current and future students.
Letter to Chancellor from students
To current and former students of the BNHM, including the UC Botanical Gardens, UC & Jepson Herbaria, Essig Museum of Entomology, UC Museum of Paleontology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology:
The Berkeley Natural History Museums (BNHM) and Field Stations (FS) are currently slated to receive a massive and devastating budget cut in the coming fiscal year. Current students from the BNHM and FS have drafted a petition to the leadership of the university conveying our extreme disappointment in their proposal to endanger the future of ecological, evolutionary, and environmental sciences at Berkeley. Please voice your support by adding your signature to the petition by following this link.
Long-form link: https://www.change.org/p/chancellor-carol-christ-preserve-berkeley-s-museums-and-field-stations
Sara Kahanamoku-Snelling (UCMP graduate student) has kindly set up the petition – all you need to do is sign it!
A new study, described as “The first “big data” analysis of California’s native plants”, was published by the University and Jepson Herbaria, and available on BMC Evolution. The authors focused on the diversity and endemism in the California flora, applying a novel “spatial phylogenetics” approach that makes it possible to evaluate biodiversity from an evolutionary standpoint, including discovering significant areas of neo- and paleo-endemism. Check out Thornhill, Baldwin, Freyman, Nosratinia, Kling, Morueta-Holme, Madsen, Ackerly, and Mishler 2017 BMC Evolution https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-017-0435-x
Look who got featured in a special issue of the California Alumni magazine!
Essig Museum’s Pete Oboyski is featured in a video cast on “How to Mount a Moth” followed by Episode 2 “How to Kill the Specimen”
Lessons to learn on your way to becoming an entomologist!
Whole genome based analyses are becoming increasingly important in biological research, spanning, but not limited to, evolutionary, medical, and conservation contexts. Genome assembly, an initial step in genomic analyses, is a rapidly developing area of research, and so staying up to date with its current state can be challenging. Furthermore, it can be difficult to understand for researchers new to the field. This workshop is targeted towards researchers having anywhere from no background up to advanced knowledge of genome assembly. It will function as a roadmap from designing genome sequencing projects all the way to obtaining a “final”genome assembly, with some brief discussion of downstream analyses. On the first afternoon, I will start very basic by covering pre-planning and laboratory topics such as the different sequencing technologies available, and how to decide on which sequencing platform and library preparation method to use. On the second afternoon, I will outline the different steps needed to process the raw sequencing data, as well as the different assembly, quality assessment and improvement methods. To make the workshop more user-friendly, I will discuss popular tools employed at the different steps.
UCMP Grad student Sara ElShafie is highlighted in the Berkeley News for her leadership in teaching scientists to communicate to broader audiences. Her first official workshop was entitled “Science Through Story: Strategies to Engage Any Audience,” in November 2016 at the annual meeting of the Western Society of Naturalists in Monterey, and was a success. It led to a March 2017 workshop at UC Berkeley with industry and faculty participants.
BNHM has activities and surprises in store; come visit us!
Science In Real Life (IRL) is a YouTube series to show you what being a scientist is like, in real life. Molly Edwards is your tour guide to behind-the-scenes look at the UC & Jepson Herbaria and other spots you find scientists going about their business. She’s engaging and fun to watch, clearly infecting her fellow scientists with a passion to explain and show but never talk down to her audience.
We’ve embedded Part I and Part II of How to make a Herbarium Specimen and All about Herbarium Research with grad students Joyce Chery and Carrie Tribble on a new page What we do. Check out the rest of Science IRL on their Youtube channel.