My dissertation research includes a systematic study of the honeysuckles (Lonicera). I am particularly interested in the evolution of floral traits and the spatial evolution of the group.

The clade consists of two subclades: Periclymenum and Xylosteum. I focus much of my geographic research on Periclymenum as it is much smaller (~24 sp.) yet contains all the distributions of interest to Northern Hemisphere biogeography.

I am currently working on a dataset consisting of multiple genes and a large percentage of taxa. I hope to use the tree(s) produced to further study the geographic evolution of the group, and more generally, the evolution of plant groups in the Northern Hemisphere.

projects

• honeysuckles
• biogeography
• simulations
• large-scale
• compuational
• databases

stephen at blackrim.org

stephen a smith