Birch Lab: Plant and Fungi Systematics

The Birch Lab conducts plant systematics and historical biogeographic research investigating the evolutionary relationships of plant and fungal lineages.

We reconstruct branches of the plant and fungal trees of life, investigate the evolution of morphological and ecological traits, and quantify and describe new taxa. We investigate how distributions of extant taxa have been shaped by evolutionary processes over geologic time. We generate genomic data to reconstruct phylogenies and conduct field- and herbarium-based studies to understand trait evolution and to identify diagnostic features of taxa.