Patrick McKenzie

@patrickmckenzie.bsky.social

1507 Followers 532 Following

Assistant Professor at Oregon State University Botany and Plant Pathology starting Sept 2026. systematics, speciation, hybridization in flowering plants. Natural history via community science. Birder, Arkansan, he/him

A bright red Monarda flower (Monarda pringlei)
Picture of a person (me) holding a stuffed beaver toy and a laptop that reads “McKenzie Lab at Oregon State University”
Small yellow bird with a black eye stripe in the center of a photo, the surrounding filled with foliage
a heatmap of average flowering time in North America, with earlier days of year colored in blues and later days as red or orange. General pattern of blue to red from south to north, but with a vertical band of red in western Mexico
email screenshot with subject line "interesting Cheilyctis observation" and timestamp 11:02pm. Message begins "Hi y'all, Keeping with my tradition of oversharing random iNaturalist observations, thought y'all might find this one interesting:"
Me in the LH Bailey Herbarium at Cornell, with a bunch of Monarda specimens out on the table
“Natural History, Crowdsourced,” an article in Arnoldia by Patrick McKenzie. The article begins with an image of a ruby-throated hummingbird visiting Lobelia cardinalis.
Chris Martine presenting in front of a PowerPoint and chalk board
12 images of Monarda flowers, each from a different species, showcasing a range of different shapes, sizes, and colors
Orange-crowned warbler
A swaddled and sleeping baby
MS-SMC predictions validated against coalescent simulations. (a) Results are shown for three models containing 1, 2, or 8 populations. For each model, 100K tree sequences were simulated for 10 different constant Ne values between 50K and 500K. (b) The distributions of summed edge lengths of the first genealogy in each tree sequence. (c-d) The mean frequency (black square) with which the first observed recombination event was a tree-change (c) or topology-change (d) in a simulated tree sequence, and the mean (colored circle) and 95% CI (grey fill) of the predicted probability of tree or topology-change calculated from the first embedded genealogy in each tree sequence. Probabilities are constant with respect to Ne in the single population model but vary in models with population structure (also shown with respect to species tree interval lengths in coalescent units, across the top axis). (e-f) The mean waiting distance (black square) until the first observed tree-change (e) or topology-change (f) in a simulated tree sequence, and the mean (colored circle) and 95% CI (grey fill) of predicted waiting distances calculated using the first embedded genealogy in each tree sequence.
Figure 2. An example genealogy embedded in a species tree and the corresponding embedding table used for MS-SMC calculations. (a) A four tip species tree is composed of seven discrete population intervals separated by speciation events (Wx), each of which can be further dissected by coalescent events (tx). (b) The probability of coalescence is constant within each discrete interval and is scaled by the number of lineages (k), the effective population size (n), and the interval length (d). Under the MS-SMC, the probability that a detached lineage will re-coalesce on a specific branch of the genealogy (e.g., branch 7) is calculated using the piecewise constant probabilities from each discrete interval spanning that branch (e.g., rows 1, 6, 7, and 8 in the embedding table).
figure illustrating the concept of an ARG, including recombination events that create no-change, vs. tree-change, vs. topology-change
Trinity showing cross-sections from personate vs open flowers
Title of my poster: iNaturalist-facilitate natural history in Monarda
Christina presenting on Texas polyploid phlox
Title slide of Deeper Bulbs are Larger
Title slide of Equitable botanical collaboration USA - Mexico: principles and perceptions
Monardella full plant
Rolled up poster at my desk
honeybee nectar-robbing from monarda fistulosa
bumblebee foraging monarda pollen
Me and kiddo with monarda fistulosa
Tip of the the upper calyx lobe of a mature M fistulosa flower, sporting a tuft of hairs
Headstone for Lena Artz alongside her family. She contributed to botanical science around the Shenandoah Valley and - close to my heart - described Monarda brevis
“In Memoriam: Lena Artz (1891-1976), a Hidden Figure of 20th-century Southeastern U.S. Botany” by Andrea Weeks in the journal Castanea
Monarda brevis showing full inflorescence and vegetative growth
Holding hands in the car with my kiddo
Me working at the JMU herbarium (photo by Andrea Berardi)
Footbridge crossing the cowpasture river
Small carpenter bee (Ceratina) on monarda inflorescence
Halictid bee on monarda (M didyma-derived cultivar) anthers.
Monardas in the back of the car. Stayed safe even without the car seat.
Figure 1: Steps with representative photographs of the flower color phenotyping pipeline. A) We exported all research-grade iNaturalist observations of Monarda fistulosa from GBIF. B) We used GPT-4o to classify each image as to whether it contained a flower. C) We trained a Roboflow semantic segmentation model on a subset of images and applied the trained model to extract “flower” pixels from each image in the dataset. D) We calculated the geometric median of each set of extracted pixels to represent the flower color phenotype from each image, and we paired this phenotype with the observation’s iNaturalist metadata for spatial analysis.
Black-throated blue warbler
Visual abstract: “we test hypotheses about floral diversity with community science data and an advanced computer vision model. Red/orange flowers have delayed flowering that matches hummingbird migratory patterns”
Two people - me and my spouse - collecting Monarda along the Bluestone River in West Virginia
Top-down look at Monarda stem with whorls of three leaves
A Wilson’s snipe. Classic bigfoot-like snipe photo in that it is taken through brush so that the bird is hardly recognizable
Cell-phone picture of a simple macro setup with ring light and black screen, with a plant in front of the screen
Allen’s hummingbird
Me standing with my sibling
Townsend’s warbler against the sky
Snowy Rocky Mountain view from an airplane window
Purple-pigmented abaxial surfaces of leaves of Monarda sp
Two side-by-side Monarda flowers with calyces. Monarda maritima on the left, Monarda viridissima on the right.
Cover of the book “The Heart of the Wild: Essays on Nature, Conservation, and the Human Future”
Stubby calyx lobes of Monarda eplingiana
Long-tailed duck swimming on the water
Two Phlox flowers - P glabriflora on the left and P drummondii on the right. The difference in the corolla tubes stands out, smooth on P glabriflora and pubescent on P drummondii
A bunch of common eiders on the water: cinnamon-colored females and white/black contrasty males. One central female eider is the northern subspecies - rare in the US - rather than “dresser’s” subspecies. This one is lighter than the rest with reduced, and pointy, frontal lobes
Northern lapwing - a European shorebird similar to a killdeer - in short grass
Monarda didyma flower cut open and taped to reveal underside of upper corolla surface. Two fertile stamens are present on top and bottom, with the style in the middle. Circled in blue are two structures that seem to be reduced stamens.
Two flowers of Phlox glabriflora
Monarda corolla with upper lobe bent back, stamens and style projecting upward. The small reduced stamens are circled in red.