Guralnick Lab - Research
More details on our research program
Approaches Used in Lab:
- Species occurrence datasets (fossil and modern) - Molecular phylogenetics - Morphometric analysis (landmark
and outline) - Comparative
evolutionary morphology - Ecological niche
modeling - Large dataset
meta-analysis - Informatics approaches to access global species and environmental data |
Species Response to Environmental Changes The research focus of the lab is global change biology. That is, our lab documents how organisms respond to environmental changes over multiple time scales, from the recent past and present to changes over tens of thousands and millions of years. Our work has applied utility in the area of conservation biology. We use a combination of field ecology, spatial ecology and genetic approaches to examine how species respond to such changes. Recent work has included documenting past and present distributions, phenologies and phenotypes of diverse organisms such as land snails, viruses, grasshoppers,and alpine mammals. We can use these patterns of change to detect, for example, signatures of selection for drug resistance on the genomes of influenza, or to document persistence and dispersal pathways for pikas in the southern and central Rockies. We use fossil and modern data in concert to examine how species respond to environmental change. Some work has explicitly examined morphological changes in gastropod shell shape as temperature and productivity in the marine realm changed during the Pleistocene. Other work has examined terrestrial mammal distribution changes during warming from the end Pleistocene to present. We have also examined how changes in shapes and size of plant leaves provide a means to infer past climate. The Biggest Picture
We are currently working in collaboration with Walter Jetz at Yale, and others, to develop the conceptual and cyberinfrastructure framework for a Map of Life. The ambition of Map of Life is simple and profound: To provide high resolution, annotated and well documented species distributions for all taxa. We believe this can be accomplished by integrating sources of information about species, from now easily available species occurrence data, to expert opinion range maps and habitat preferences. With a Map of Life in place, it will also be possible to document distributions changes over time in response to environmental perturbations. Summary We are biodiversity scientists and our research focuses on spatiotemporal changes in genetic and species diversity. We take an integrative approach to global change biology and the skills in lab range from occupancy modeling to spatial ecological modeling, to landscape genetics, to molecular phylogenetics. The diversity in lab is also its strength -- we continue to discover that the interesting questions are the integrative ones that require multiple lines of evidence.
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