Title: “Merging ecology and genomics to understand evolutionary responses to environmental change”

Speaker: Stephen Keller, Ph.D.
AL-UMCES

An emerging challenge for environmental scientists and natural resource managers is determining how species respond to environmental change, including changes in climate that affect growing season length and ecosystem productivity. In forested ecosystems, growing season length is determined by phenology -- the period between the onset of tree growth in spring (bud flush) and the cessation of growth in late summer (bud set). The period between these key phenological events dictates the active period of biomass accrual and height growth in trees, and is thus under considerable selective constraint within populations, and strong divergent selection between populations inhabiting different environments. Trees in the genus Populus (poplars and aspens) are ecologically and economically important components of North American forests, and are also a model system in tree genomics. Ecological genetic studies of poplar trees sampled from natural stands across North America suggest a strong impact of historical climate change on past population movements, as well as on evolutionary shifts in phenology and other ecophysiological traits that adapt populations to their local climate environments. However, with this evolutionary history of past climate responses comes the susceptibility of forests to becoming maladapted in the future, as modern climate change may offset populations from their optimal environments more rapidly than dispersal or selection can reconnect them. This question is currently being explored by integrating genomic data on climate adaptation with spatial models of growing season length and climate variability to predict where populations are likely to become the most and least adapted to future climates.

Host: J. Sook Chung, Ph.D.

Location: IMET's Multi-Purpose Room