[Ccb_faculty] Fwd: THIS THURSDAY @ 7PM! - CalBotSoc Botany Speaker: Kate Ostevik

[Amy Litt]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Membership <membership at calbotsoc.org>
Date: Mon, Oct 5, 2026 at 9:00 AM
Subject: THIS THURSDAY @ 7PM! - CalBotSoc Botany Speaker: Kate Ostevik
To: <amy.litt at ucr.edu>


October 8, 7-8 pm - "Lessons from California's Floral Diversity"
*THURSDAY, October 8, 2026 7-8 pm PT*

Botany Speaker

*Kate Ostevik*
*"Lessons from California’s Floral Diversity"*
*TALK DESCRIPTION*

California’s extraordinary floral diversity provides an opportunity to
understand the processes that generate and maintain biodiversity. In the
Ostevik lab, we study plant diversification through two complementary
lenses: adaptation and speciation. I will highlight ongoing projects that
illustrate both. First, I will discuss adaptation to drought in wild
sunflower (*Helianthus annuus*). In a common-garden experiment, populations
from more arid regions of California flower early. This is consistent with
a drought-escape strategy, and this seems to have tradeoffs with drought
avoidance and tolerance. A resurrection experiment comparing ancestral and
contemporary populations similarly reveals a shift toward earlier flowering
under increasingly dry conditions that has consequences for interactions
with other species. Second, I will discuss a putative case of homoploid
hybrid speciation in southern California *Penstemon*. *Penstemon
clevelandii* is reproductively isolated from both parental species, *P.
spectabilis* and *P. centranthifolius*. Further, although the parents are
also strongly reproductively isolated, genomic evidence suggests that
hybridization between them contributed to the formation of *P. clevelandii*.
However, *P. clevelandii* is not a simple 50:50 mixture of the parental
genomes. Instead, our results are more consistent with introgressive
speciation. Determining whether this introgression directly contributed to
the evolution of reproductive barriers will require further work.
Information and Zoom Link
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*BIO*

Kate Ostevik is an assistant professor in the Department of Evolution,
Ecology, and Organismal Biology at the University of California Riverside.
She earned her Ph.D. in Botany at the University of British Columbia where
she studied how adaptation to sand dunes facilitates speciation in
sunflowers. As a postdoc, she moved to Duke University to study the
reproductive barriers that separate species and how mating systems and
hybridization can affect them. More broadly, her research centers on the
fields of speciation, evolutionary ecology, and population genetics. And,
she is particularly interested in how reproductive barriers, hybridization,
and genome architecture influence the diversification of flowering plants.
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*Upcoming Botany Talks: *

12-Nov: Jon Rebman, Mary and Dallas Clark Endowed Chair/Curator of Botany,
San Diego Natural History Museum
10-Dec: Andy Cabrera, California State University, Fresno
14-Jan: Marko Spasojevic, University of California, Riverside
11-Feb: Sula Vanderplank, Terrestrial Ecosystem Conservation and
Trans-border Partnerships for Pronatura Noroeste


*Give a Botany Talk!  Email our Membership chair at
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