Abstract:
Organisms exhibit a diversity of strategies for persisting in variable environments: at one extreme, they may specialize on a subset of the conditions that are available to them; at the other, they may maintain flexible phenotypes that allow them to use a broad range of habitats or resources. Understanding the processes that shape these alternative strategies is critical for explaining current species distribution patterns and predicting how organisms will respond to future environmental change. My lab investigates the ecological, demographic and genetic drivers of ecological specialization and phenotypic plasticity in plant populations. In this seminar, I will first present a series of studies that investigate the evolution of habitat specialization in plants that are restricted to narrow microhabitats in heavily threatened wetlands in the western US. Next, I will discuss our ongoing efforts to examine the drivers of flowering phenology in a community of forest herbs in the Midwestern US that completes its growth and reproduction during a brief window of time each spring. Finally, I will present some preliminary data on a new project that is examining the evolutionary feedbacks between habitat specialization and dispersal evolution in two independent plant lineages. Throughout the seminar, I will highlight the significance of our findings for predicting how species will respond to human disturbance, habitat loss, and climate change.