Ana Maria Bedoya

Profile

Ana Maria Bedoya is a plant biologist investigating how the world’s richest flora—the Neotropical flora— was and continues to be shaped by the geological and climatic history of our planet. Even though this question has received significant attention from the botany community over the years, past work centered on terrestrial and montane taxa. Ana brings a novel perspective to the field by expanding research on terrestrial plants, with studies of taxa living outside of mountains, but in ecosystems that are greatly shaped by mountain building and imperiled by climate change and human disturbances: aquatic plants. She aims to develop river plants as a model system to study evolution in nature and in action, and to translate this knowledge into practical solutions to the climate crisis and the conservation of freshwater ecosystems, which are especially vulnerable to the unprecedented current trends of climate change. Bedoya’s research program relies primarily on field observations, herbarium collections, and analysis of large-scale genetic data.

Selected Publications:

Bedoya, A.M. 2024. Botany and geogenomics: Constraining geological hypotheses in the neotropics with large-scale genetic data derived from plants. American Journal of Botany. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajb2.16306

Frost, L.A., A. M. Bedoya & L.P. Lagomarsino. 2024. Artifactual Orthologs and the Need for Diligent Data Exploration in Complex Phylogenomic Datasets: A Museomic Case Study from the Andean Flora. Systematic Biology 73: 308-322. https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syad076

Bedoya, A.M. & A.J. Pérez-Castañeda. 2023. New records of riverweeds (Podostemaceae) from the tropical Andes (Colombia and Ecuador): getting our feet wet to bypass collection bias in Neotropical rivers. Phytotaxa 585: 274-280.

Muñoz-Sánchez, A.M., L. Rojas-Castellanos, M. Medina-Marchán, and A.M. Bedoya. 2023. Plants associated with humid environments of the Coroncoro wetland (Villavicencio, Colombia). Field Museum Field Guides. 1303.

Bedoya, A.M. & R.G. Olmstead. 2022. Strange but common in isolated environments: new records of Marathrum (Podostemaceae) in rivers of Colombia. Aquatic Botany 177: 103483.

Bedoya, A.M., A.D. Leaché & R.G. Olmstead. 2021. Andean uplift, drainage basin formation, and the evolution of plants living in fast flowing aquatic ecosystems in northern South America. New Phytologist 232: 217-2190.

Bedoya, A.M. & A.D. Leaché. 2021. Characterization of a pericentric inversion in Plateau Fence Lizards (Sceloporus tristichus): Evidence from chromosome-scale genomes. G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics 11, jkab036.

Bedoya, A.M., B.R. Ruhfel, C.T. Philbrick, S. Madriñán, C.P. Bove, A. Mesterházy & R.G. Olmstead. 2019. Plastid genomes of five species of riverweeds (Podostemaceae): Structural organization and comparative analysis in Malpighiales. Frontiers in Plant Science 10: 1035.

Olmstead, R.G. & A.M. Bedoya. 2019. Whole genomes: The holy grail. A commentary on `Molecular phylogenomics of tribe Shoreeae (Dipterocarpaceae) using whole plastid genomes.’ Annals of Botany 123, iv-v.

Madriñán, S., Rial, A., A.M. Bedoya, M. Fernández. 2017. Plantas acuaticas de la Orinoquia Colombiana. Ediciones Uniandes. ISBN: 978-958-774-526-9. pp. 656. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7440/j.ctv11vcdzh

Fernández, M., A.M. Bedoya, S. Madriñán, 2015. Plantas acuáticas de las planicies inundables de la
Orinoquia colombiana. Biota Colombiana 16: 96-105.

Bedoya, A.M., and S. Madriñán. 2015. Evolution of the aquatic habit in Ludwigia (Onagraceae): morpho- anatomical adaptive strategies in the Neotropics. Aquatic Botany 120: 352-.362