S'more Science Lecture Series

The revamped S'more Science lecture series will occur monthly once a month on a Friday from 6:00 PM - 7:00 PM at Joshua Tree National Park Store (West), 55922 29 Palms Hwy Yucca Valley, CA. The lectures, curated by the JTNPA Education team, will be designed to make scientific content accessible to the public. 

This is ADA accessible - little to no travel required.

The S'more Science series bridges the gap between scientific research and the public by disseminating relevant findings and fostering community engagement. The program was developed to meet the presentation requirement of the Marian Huff Tremblay Science Scholarship. We will host a range of desert researchers and scientists for this programming, widening the scope beyond scholarship awardees. 

Desert Institute has a long history of community outreach, providing hundreds of public lectures and events over the past 20 years that elucidate the natural and cultural histories of the Morongo Basin and Coachella Valley. The Slice of Science lecture series features lectures, presentations, demonstrations, and workshops by scientists and researchers who focus their efforts on desert environments. These lectures are a suggested donation of $5 and open to the public!  

A huge thank you to Mojave Mallows for generously donating their delicious marshmallows for this season's lecture series! Your support makes a world of difference. Please support this amazing local organization by visiting their website and shopping for your own tasty treats.

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 Friday, September 12, 6:00 - 7:00 PM

Joshua Trees: Science and Stewardship to Save a Species, by Nick Graver.

How do we respond when a widespread species is threatened by climate change? Joshua trees are symbols of the Mojave and hold immense cultural and ecological importance. However, Joshua trees are extremely slow growing, making them challenging to study. By closely studying the branching patterns of the trees — and using radiocarbon dating to uncover the stories held within — we can learn a tremendous amount about the lives of these mysterious trees. Next, we will discuss how this kind of science can inform on the ground management decision making to best protect the species. But there's a catch — science can't tell us what our ethics are or what principles we value most in conserving nature.

Nick Graver is a vegetation ecologist at Joshua Tree National Park and has studied Joshua trees and desert plant communities in the park since 2016. Since 2023, he has been taking this work as step further as a PhD student in the Regan Lab at University of California Riverside. He is also the Lead Resource Advisor for the park, meaning he responds to active wildfires to help conserve natural and cultural resources under threat. He is a technical rescue specialist for the park and an avid rock climber. In all of his abundant spare time, he enjoys long walks on the Pacific Crest Trail and the Appalachian Trail, among other adventures.

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Friday, October 3, 6:00 - 7:00 PM
Managing Recreational Use in a Changing Landscape at Joshua Tree National Park, by Dr. Sheri Shiflett.

Joshua Tree National Park (JTNP), spanning nearly 800,000 acres, offers visitors opportunities for solitude, challenge, and discovery in a vast desert landscape, while also providing campgrounds, interpretive tours, roadside signage, and numerous hiking trails in the front country. Annual visitation surpassed two million in 2015 and reached nearly three million by 2018—more than doubling the average of fewer than 1.3 million annual visits recorded between 1979 and 2013. This increase far outpaced the park’s capacity to support such a rapid uptick in use and the dramatic increase in visitation in a short period of time put park managers in a reactive mode and also caused many associated issues, such as extensive lines at entrance stations, conflicts over parking and camping spots, and impacts to park resources. For the past decade, JTNP staff have worked to balance daily operations with urgent, short-term responses—such as traffic control, emergency signage, and parking restrictions—while also developing long-term visitor use management strategies. Over the last five years, the park has tested and began implementing measures including relocating the West Entrance Fee Station, expanding and improving parking, painting curbing red to reduce illegal and unsafe parking, launching the Preventative Search and Rescue (PSAR) program and “Don’t Die Today” campaign, the latter of which is  in partnership with Joshua Tree National Park Association, and enhancing visitor outreach for advance trip planning. Today, visitation remains steady at approximately three million visits annually. With this sustained demand, the park faces ongoing challenges in protecting its natural, cultural, and wilderness resources while ensuring a high-quality visitor experience. The park has a five-year plan to make critical infrastructure improvements to benefit the protection of environmental and heritage values and improve visitor experience for current and future generations. Restricting the number of visitors entering the park is not currently being considered, but managers are continuing to monitor the situation while investing in education and infrastructure improvements.

Dr. Sheri Shiflett is the Division Lead for Science and Resource Stewardship at Joshua Tree National Park. Since graduating from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2013 with a Ph.D. in plant ecology, she has spent her career bridging the gap between academic ecological research and management of natural resources. While an Assistant Professor at University of North Carolina Wilmington, she taught human dimensions of natural resources management and as a Science Coordinator at Yosemite National Park, she developed studies on recreational impacts on natural resources to inform visitor use planning. Sheri is an avid lover of nature and enjoys backpacking.

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Friday, November 14, 6:00 - 7:00 PM
Ecological Divergence and Hybrid Speciation in the Penstemons of Southern California, by S. Gangothri. 

Hybridization plays a crucial role in plant speciation, with one notable outcome being homoploid hybrid speciation. In this process, a new reproductively isolated, hybrid lineage arises without a shift in chromosomal number from its parent species. This is less understood as reproductive isolation between hybrids and their parents may arise through various pathways, including chromosomal rearrangements, ecological divergence, or sorting parental genetic incompatibilities in the hybrids. The genus Penstemon includes a group of plant species that are thought to have undergone a homoploid hybridization event. Specifically, P. spectabilis and P. centranthifolius have hybridized to give rise to the hybrid species P. clevelandii.  My research aims at understanding the ecological and genetic processes underlying homoploid hybrid speciation in Penstemons. Currently, I am investigating the reproductive barriers that maintain species boundaries between the hybrid and its parent species. These barriers may include ecological differentiation, such as habitat preference, variation in flowering time, or distinct pollinator interactions, as well as cross-incompatibility between the hybrid and parent species. Going forward, I aim to assess the evolutionary history of hybrid species P. clevelandii using genetic data and understand how hybridization could contribute to the reproductive isolation between the hybrid and parent species.

Gangothri is a second-year Ph.D. student in Dr. Kate Ostevik’s lab at the University of California, Riverside. She is interested in understanding the mechanisms that drive species diversity and their adaptation to diverse environmental conditions. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) in India. During her undergraduate studies, she explored topics such as the impact of food quality on male sexually selected traits and the evolutionary ecology of eye pattern variation in frogs. For her master’s research, she worked in the Western Ghats—one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots—where she investigated the role of pollinator interactions in plant community assembly and how Flor ivory influences sex expression in plants. Her current doctoral work examines hybrid speciation in Penstemon species native to S.

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Photo credit: Desert Institute Riley Vallo