The Pace of Plant Life: How Life History Impacts the Evolution of Seed Plants - Stephen A. Smith. 
Plants live at dramatically different speeds. Some complete their entire life cycle in a few weeks, while others, can persist for thousands of years. This difference in the pace of life, which includes how long plants live and when they first reproduce, turns out to shape evolution in predictable ways. In this talk, I discuss how these differences impact evolution on a large scale. Looking broadly across seed plants, I will connect lifespans and life history with widespread patterns across the plant tree of life. I argue that these life-history effects extend beyond DNA to large-scale shifts in physical traits and the types of climates plants can occupy across the tree of life. Finally, I highlight how modern biological collections, especially herbaria, make this work possible at an unprecedented scale. By linking preserved specimens to their genomes and environments, we can extract millions of measurable traits from images. Together, these results suggest that many major patterns in plant evolution are not mysteries of scientific method, but natural consequences of how plants live.

Stephen A. Smith received his PhD at Yale University in 2008 under Michael Donoghue. He has been at the University of Michigan in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department since 2012 where he is currently Professor and Associate Curator of the herbarium. He teaches courses on evolution and phylogenetic methods and theory. His research focuses on plant evolution, detecting and describing large scale patterns of evolution, examining differences in the rate of molecular evolution, and using new data sources like transcriptomes and genomes to address these questions. In 2024, Dr. Smith earned election to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.