Adaptation & Plasticity
In this era of human-dominated ecology, organisms on Earth are in a race to adapt quickly enough to a changing world in order to avoid extinction. Members of the SEEC Lab strive to understand patterns and scale of adaptation, the role of phenotypic plasticity in facilitating adaptation, and the potential for contemporary adaptive evolution to allow population persistence (a.k.a evolutionary rescue). We use modeling, field observations, common garden, and reciprocal transplant approaches in native and invasive model systems.
Select SEEC Lab Papers
Sparks, M. M†., P.A.H. Westley, J. A. Falke, and T. P. Quinn. 2017*. Thermal adaptation and phenotypic plasticity in a warming world: Insights from common garden experiments on Alaskan sockeye salmon. Global Change Biology 23: 5203-5217.
Carlson, S.M, C. Cunningham, and P.A.H. Westley‡. 2014*. Evolutionary rescue in a changing world. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 29: 521-530.
Westley, P.A.H, R. Stanley, and I.A. Fleming. 2013. Experimental tests for heritable morphological color plasticity in non-native brown trout. PlosONE 8(11): e80401. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0080401
Westley, P.A.H, E.J. Ward, and I.A. Fleming. 2012* Fine-scale local adaptation in an invasive freshwater fish has evolved in contemporary time. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 280: 20122327.