Research

My fellow lab mates from the Logan Lab and I set up a long-term research system in the Great Basin Desert of Nevada to understand how animals are coping with a changing climate. We work at two sites that differ in elevation, which lets us incorporate factors like differing thermal environments, predation, vegetation, resource availability, and more into experimental designs. Western fence lizards a great model species because they’re common, easy to study in the field, and territorial, giving us the chance to ask big questions about ecology and evolution in a system we can return to year after year.

My research focuses on how different traits covary, a concept called the Pace of Life Syndrome (POLS). Under POLS, traits like growth rate, behavior, and thermal preferences often cluster along “slow–fast” or “shy–bold” axes, and are hypothesized to be driven by variation in metabolism. In my first chapter, I reviewed recent literature incorporating thermal physiology into studies of trait covariation and found that support for POLS is pretty mixed (read it here). Overall, I’m interested in how survival pressures and climate can shape these patterns of covariation, and what that can tell us about how animals balance trade-offs in their lives. By combining mark-recapture with field and lab data collection in wild lizard populations, I aim to get a clearer picture of how trait combinations evolve and why they matter in a changing environment.

The work that went into building this system, and now the research coming out of it is highly collaborative. Together, my lab mates and I have used 3D-printed operative temperature models and a drone with a thermal camera to map the thermal landscapes at our sites, giving us a much clearer picture of the environments the lizards actually experience (read it here). Building on that, Guille is investigating the evolution of viviparity in lizards (check it out here), and Noa is developing new tools like wind-mapping techniques to capture even finer details of local climates. This collaborative approach doesn’t just let us collect more data, it helps us collect better, more detailed data from different perspectives. By working together, we’re able to build a deeper, multi-year understanding of how these populations are changing.