Science at the intersection of ecology, evolution, and conservation

We aim to understand the processes that shape how organisms tolerate extreme conditions and respond to environmental change using field, greenhouse, laboratory, and computational tools.

Major themes in Our Research

We combine short-term experiments, long-term observations, molecular tools, comparative methods, and computational models to study fundamental questions about life history evolution in variable environments.

Evolutionary Pathways to Ecological Specialization
We examine how ecological context shapes the expression of genetic variation, patterns of gene flow, and stochastic population dynamics. Taken together, these processes reveal how and when species can thive in rare and extreme environments.
Organismal Strategies for Managing Uncertainty
We evaluate the growth and reproductive patterns that allow populations to persist in variable and unpredictable environments. This work tests long-standing hypotheses about the evolution of life history strategies while improving our ability predict responses to future change.
Conserving Rare Species in Vanishing Habitats
We study taxa that rely on environmental conditions that are rapidly changing due to human activity. We aim to develop a general understanding of rare plant dynamics while contributing to the conservation and management of specific endangered speces.

Featured Projects

01.

Evolution of seed dispersal and dormancy in variable environments
We are exploring how plants evolve to navigate complex landscapes and find suitable habitat through seed movement and dormancy. We have found that seed characteristics associated with dispersal and dormancy can evolve rapidly and be predicted by how plant performance responds to environmental variability. These results provide rare empirical evidence of how dispersal and dormancy traits interact to determine if and when plants can successfully navigate changing conditions in their environment.

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02.

Causes and consequences of habitat specialization in extreme environments
We study the evolution of habitat specialization: how and when organisms come to rely on a subset of the conditions available to them in the environment. Our research in this area includes a range of plants that occupy distinct and extreme environments, including seasonally flooded wetlands in California, rockhouses of the Appalachian Mountains, and the high alpine of the Southern Rocky Mountains in Colorado. Much of our work focuses on disentangling the ecological and evolutionary processes that drive plants into these unusual habitats. We also explore the consequences of habitat specialization for these species as they face rapid environmental changes due to human impacts.

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03.

Evolutionary-informed conservation of threatened plant species
Plants are facing rapid and severe environmental change due to habitat loss, climate change, and other consequences of human activity. Our lab uses field experiments and molecular tools to understand how evolutionary history and capacity for future evolutionary change will influence the persistence of species in a human-dominated world. We study rare and threatened taxa and plant communities that have been identified as conservation priorities to understand how population genetics, demography, and gene flow interact to shape patterns of local adaptation and evolutionary potential in natural and restored habitats.

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