Research
Our research addresses key questions in ecology and evolutionary biology by integrating field-based and growth chamber experiments with laboratory and analytical techniques.
You do not have to have a research project in mind before conducting research in my lab. We will collaborate on developing a project together! Collaborations with students have made my research expand in new, fun, and interesting directions.
You do not have to have a research project in mind before conducting research in my lab. We will collaborate on developing a project together! Collaborations with students have made my research expand in new, fun, and interesting directions.
Fitness consequences of plasticity
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An organism's phenotype is the product of genetics and the environment. The environmental contribution, or plasticity, can arise from conditions experienced during an organism's development, but can also emerge in response to the conditions experienced by its parents. We study interactions between within-generation and transgenerational plasticity and their effects on phenotypic variation and fitness using a variety of environmental manipulations and study species. Topics of investigation include maternal vs. paternal environmental effects, the influence of mating system and the pollination environment, and the role of DNA methylation in generating transgenerational responses (in collaboration with Dr. Debbie Thurtle-Schmidt). |
Constraints to local adaptation under climate change
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In plants, life history transitions are often initiated by dependable combinations or sequences of cues that are indicative of favorable conditions. Climate change is likely to alter some cues at different rates, while other cues, like photoperiod, will remain unaffected. Recently, my collaborators and I have shown that climate change can decouple historically reliable patterns of temperature and photoperiod disproportionately among species that differ in seasonal reproductive timing. Consequently, climate change can induce flowering at inopportune times, and may even cause individuals to fail to flower. We are continuing to explore whether disassociations between temperature and photoperiod will constrain the expression of adaptive life history transitions. |
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Climate change is imposing novel selection pressures on natural plant populations. We have shown that this causes widespread maladaptation because local genotypes cannot maintain fitness. Furthermore, genotypes that migrate upslope achieve higher fitness. In an ongoing collaboration with Dr. Jill Anderson, we are examining the contributions of phenotypic plasticity, adaptive evolution, and maternal effects to biological responses to climate change. To accomplish this, we expose populations of the ecological model plant Boechera stricta (Brassicaceae) to a snow removal and addition experiment conducted across an elevational gradient. |
Eco-evolutionary conservation biology
Natural populations negatively impacted by climate change, urbanization, and other stressors may need human intervention to persist. One strategy for increasing population growth and adaptive evolution in declining populations is to move individuals from one portion of a species' range to another (assisted gene flow) or to move individuals beyond a species' current range boundary in anticipation of future favorable migratory events (assisted migration). We have previously highlighted the importance of matching phenotypic optima with climate to maximize the success of these programs and have demonstrated that phenological variation among populations can reduce and bias the degree of genetic introgression between populations. Moving forward, we study the contexts in which these managements plans are feasible and likely to succeed. Current projects assess assisted gene flow as a viable conservation strategy by exploring the ideal spatial scale of relocations under climate change and the influence of nonrandom gene flow on the expansion of genetic variation.
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