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Societal Impact Statement Humans are dependent upon plants for oxygen, food, textiles, and medicines. Climate change and deforestation represent serious threats to our planet, causing significant disruptions to our ability to access and utilize these plant resources; this makes a botanically literate workforce and plant science careers more important than ever. Unfortunately, the current state of botanical career opportunities and training programs in the United States remains unclear. This study focuses on the current employment trends of government and private sector botanists and what skills future plant scientists will need to be successful in these careers. Summary: Plant science plays a crucial role in our society and in ongoing efforts to address many global challenges, including food insecurity and climate change. Yet, despite a predicted increase in plant science career opportunities in the United States, the botanical career landscape outside of academia is not well understood.To further our understanding of the training required for non‐academic botanical careers, the botanical sub‐disciplines used on the job, and career challenges faced by plant scientists, we surveyed 61 scientists working in government and 59 scientists working in the private sector in the United States.In both career sectors, > 80% of survey participants reported recent hires at the bachelor's degree level. New personnel with master's degrees were more commonly reported in the government sector (95%) than in the private sector (69%). Most plant scientists working in government reported a focus on plant ecology and resource management. By contrast, most industry/non‐profit work involved horticulture and biotechnology, with some specific skills spanning both sectors. Notably, one prediction made nearly a decade ago appears to be manifesting: plant scientists seem to be retiring more quickly than they are being replaced. Survey respondents reported that attempts to hire full‐time staff are met with obstacles, including insufficient funding. Plant science professionals in both career sectors emphasized their routine use of botanical skills developed as students, highlighting the need for effective training at the undergraduate level.We discuss the implications of these findings and present several recommendations for preparing future generations of plant scientists and increasing the scientific community's botanical capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Societal Impact Statement: Botanical careers are more important than ever, given that environmental challenges such as climate change and deforestation threaten plants daily and because plants contribute to solutions to these problems. Plants act as our sources of food, medicine, textiles, and oxygen, which means finding ways to mitigate these environmental challenges is crucial. Despite this, little is known about what career opportunities exist for botanists outside of academia and how well academia is training graduate students for these careers. This study centers on the current state of academic botanical careers and how well students completing post‐baccalaureate degrees (herein referred to as graduate students) are being prepared to fill careers within the botanical workforce. Summary: Plant science plays a crucial role in our society and in ongoing efforts to address many global challenges, including food insecurity and climate change. Despite a predicted increase in botanical career opportunities, little is known about how well academia is training graduate students for careers outside of academia.To further our understanding of the current state of academic training for botanical careers, we surveyed 85 faculty and 40 graduate students working in academia in the plant sciences in the United States.We found that the top challenges to university professors in academia are lack of support staff and funding, whereas students completing their post‐baccalaureate degrees cited finances and lack of supportive mentoring as their top challenges. Despite the fact that most graduate students surveyed wanted a career at a research‐intensive university, many botanists in academia are retiring without being replaced by more botanists. Faculty expertise is also misaligned with needs from industry and government employers, causing challenges to training graduate students for these careers outside of academia. Although our data point to a lack of career opportunities within academia, we also note that current graduate student education still emphasizes such careers and is not properly preparing graduate students for the careers they are more likely to obtain within the private and government sectors.We discuss the implications of these findings and present several recommendations for preparing future generations of plant scientists for more realistic career trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Premise: The study of phenotypic divergence of, and selection on, functional traits in closely related taxa provides the opportunity to detect the role of natural selection in driving diversification. If the strength or direction of selection in field populations differs between taxa in a pattern that is consistent with the phenotypic difference between them, then natural selection reinforces the divergence. Few studies have sought evidence for such concordance for physiological traits. Methods: Herbarium specimen records were used to detect phenological differences between sister taxa independent of the effects on flowering time of long‐term variation in the climate across collection sites. In the field, physiological divergence in photosynthetic rate, transpiration rate, and instantaneous water‐use efficiency were recorded during vegetative growth and flowering in 13 field populations of two taxon pairs of Clarkia, each comprising a self‐pollinating and a outcrossing taxon. Results: Historically, each selfing taxon flowered earlier than its outcrossing sister taxon, independent of the effects of local long‐term climatic conditions. Sister taxa differed in all focal traits, but the degree and (in one case) the direction of divergence depended on life stage. In general, self‐pollinating taxa had higher gas exchange rates, consistent with their earlier maturation. In 6 of 18 comparisons, patterns of selection were concordant with the phenotypic divergence (or lack thereof) between sister taxa. Conclusions: Patterns of selection on physiological traits measured in heterogeneous conditions do not reliably reflect divergence between sister taxa, underscoring the need for replicated studies of the direction of selection within and among taxa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engaging students in authentic research increases student knowledge, develops STEM skills, such as data analysis and scientific communication, and builds community. Creating authentic research opportunities in plant biology might be particularly crucial in addressing plant awareness disparity (PAD) (formerly known as plant blindness), producing graduates with botanical literacy, and preparing students for plant-focused careers. Our consortium created four CUREs (course-based undergraduate research experiences) focused on dual themes of plant biology and global change, designed to be utilized by early and late-career undergraduates across a variety of educational settings. We implemented these CURES for four semesters, in a total of 15 courses, at four institutions. Pre- and post-course assessments used the Affective Elements of Science Learning Questionnaire and parts of a "plant blindness" instrument to quantify changes in scientific self-efficacy, science values, scientific identity, and plant awareness or knowledge. The qualitative assessment also queried self-efficacy, science values, and scientific identity. Data revealed significant and positive shifts in awareness of and interest in plants across institutions. However, quantitative gains in self-efficacy and scientific identity were only found at two of four institutions tested. This project demonstrates that implementing plant CUREs can produce affective and cognitive gains across institutional types and course levels. Focusing on real-world research questions that capture students' imaginations and connect to their sense of place could create plant awareness while anchoring students in scientific identities. While simple interventions can alleviate PAD, implementing multiple CUREs per course, or focusing more on final CURE products, could promote larger and more consistent gains in student affect across institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the collection of manuscripts from the symposium, "Biology Beyond the Classroom: Experiential Learning through Authentic Research, Design, and Community Engagement," presented at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. The following papers showcase innovative approaches for engaging undergraduate students in experiential science learning experiences. Specifically, we focus on three high-impact practices that allow students to take their learning outside of the classroom for increased relevance and authenticity: (1) Course-Based Undergraduate Research, (2) Digital Fabrication in Makerspaces, and (3) Service or Community-based Learning Opportunities. Although each topic is unique, all provide an alternative approach to the traditional lecture and have proven effective at appealing to diverse groups of students who are traditionally underrepresented in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics workforce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Temporal variation in stress might signify changes in an animal's internal or external environment, while spatial variation in stress might signify variation in the quality of the habitats that individual animals experience. Habitat-induced variations in stress might be easiest to detect in highly territorial animals, and especially in species that do not take advantage of common strategies for modulating habitat-induced stress, such as migration (escape in space) or hibernation (escape in time). Spatial and temporal variation in response to potential stressors has received little study in wild animals, especially at scales appropriate for relating stress to specific habitat characteristics. Here, we use the American pika (Ochotona princeps), a territorial small mammal, to investigate stress response within and among territories. For individually territorial animals such as pikas, differences in habitat quality should lead to differences in stress exhibited by territory owners. We indexed stress using stress-associated hormone metabolites in feces collected non-invasively from pika territories every 2 weeks from June to September 2018. We hypothesized that differences in territory quality would lead to spatial differences in mean stress and that seasonal variation in physiology or the physical environment would lead to synchronous variation across territories through time. We used linear mixed-effects models to explore spatiotemporal variation in stress using fixed effects of day-of-year and broad habitat characteristics (elevation, aspect, site), as well as local variation in habitat characteristics hypothesized to affect territory quality for this saxicolous species (talus depth, clast size, available forage types). We found that temporal variation within territories was greater than spatial variation among territories, suggesting that shared seasonal stressors are more influential than differences in individual habitat quality. This approach could be used in other wildlife studies to refine our understanding of habitat quality and its effect on individual stress levels as a driver of population decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In habitats where resource availability declines during the growing season , selection may favor early-flowering individuals. Under such ephemerally favorable conditions, late-blooming species (and individuals) may be particularly vulnerable to resource limitation of seed production. In California, a region prone to seasonal drought, members of the annual genus Clarkia are among the last to flower in the spring. We compared pollen limitation ( PL) of seed set and outcrossing rates between early- and late-flowering individuals in two mixed-mating Clarkia taxa to detect whether flowering time is associated with changes in seed set due to resource depletion, PL, or increased selfing. In 2008-2010, we hand-pollinated one flower on a total of 1855 individual plants either Early (near the onset of flowering) or Late (near the end of flowering) in the flowering season and compared seed set to adjacent, open-pollinated flowers on the same stem. To assess the contribution of pollen quality to reproduction, we first (2008) used allozymes to estimate outcrossing rates of seeds produced by Early and Late open-pollinated flowers. Second (2009), we conducted an anther-removal experiment to estimate self-pollen deposition. Seed set in Clarkia unguiculata was not pollen-limited. Clarkia xantiana ssp . xantiana was pollen-limited in 2008 and 2010, but not 2009. PL did not differ between Early and Late treatments. In both taxa, seed set of Early flowers was greater than Late flowers, but not due to PL in the latter. Reproduction was generally pollinator-dependent. Most pollen deposition was xenogamous, and outcrossing rates were >0.7 - and similar between Early and Late periods. These results suggest that pollen receipt and pollen quality remain seasonally consistent. By contrast, the resources necessary to provision seeds decline, reducing the fitness benefits associated with resource allocation to ovules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]