Research Summary
Phylogenetics & Biodiversity. Development and application of phylogenetic methods in ecology and conservation biology. Phylogenetics offers a powerful means to explore evolutionary mechanisms shaping ecological patterns and the distribution of species richness. A better understanding of the processes shaping biodiversity patterns will be critical if we wish to reduce current rates of biodiversity loss.
Biodiversity and Evolution in the context of Mathematics of Planet Earth:
Workshop on the Mathematics for an Evolving Biodiversity, September 16-20, 2013
This workshop will provide an overview of recent theoretical and methodological developments for modelling the complex evolutionary dynamics that have shaped the structure of contemporary biodiversity. Theoretical work at the interface between ecology and evolutionary studies will be presented, as well as its applications to empirical data.
Latest Research
Study Shows Experiments Underestimate Plant Responses to Climate Change
Experiments may dramatically underestimate how plants will respond to climate change in the future. That’s the conclusion of our analysis of 50 plant studies on four continents, published in the journal Nature, which found that shifts in the timing of flowering and leafing in plants due to global warming appear to be much greater than estimated by warming experiments.
Our study suggests that predicted ecosystem changes—including continuing advances in the start of spring across much of the globe—may be far greater than current estimates based on data from experiments. Up to now, it’s been assumed that experimental systems will respond the same as natural systems respond—but they don’t. Experiments predict that every degree rise Celsius would advance plants’ flowering and leafing from half a day to 1.6 days. But in looking at actual observations in nature, we found advances four times faster for leafing—and over eight times faster for flowering. These records consistently showed that phenological events are advancing, on average, about 5 to 6 days per degree Celsius.
- Press:
BBC News: Plants flower faster than climate change models predict
- Publications:
Wolkovich, E. M., Cook, B. I., Allen, J. M., Crimmins, T. M., Travers, S., Pau, S., Regetz, J., Davies, T. J., Betancourt, J. L., Kraft, N. J. B., Ault, T. R., Bolmgren, K., Mazer, S. J., McCabe, G., J. McGill, B. J., Parmesan, C., Salamin, N., Schwartz, M. D. and Cleland, E. E. [2012]. Warming experiments underpredict plant phenological responses to climate change. Nature doi:10.1038/nature11014.
Read online: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature11014.html
Just because...
Darwin jumped on a bandwagon, Mendelian genetics retarded the expansion of evolutionary theory, and the recent resurgence of interest in fruit.
Google’s Ngram viewer (http://books.google.com/ngrams/) provides a fascinating insight into the changing frequency of occurrence of keywords through time, mining the vast information database that is Google Books.
As someone with an interest in ecology and evolution, I thought it might be fun to map their trends. Because I was not sure what biases might exist in the database, I also included what I thought would be a neutral keyword ‘fruit’.
Here is my very non-scientific interpretation of what I found. Evolution is much more popular than ecology, and even overtook fruit in the 1960’s. The rise of evolution predates publication of the Origin of Species, suggesting Darwin jumped on the evolution bandwagon. Mendelian genetics and a better understanding of inheritance temporarily stalled evolution’s growth, which only recovered after Watson & Crick’s publication on the structure of DNA. Evolution continued to gain in popularity up until around 2000, at which point both ecology and evolution decline but there is a resurgence of interest in fruit – just a coincidence?
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| Contact information: Dr. Jonathan Davies Department of Biology, McGill University Stewart Biology Building 1205 ave Docteur Penfield, Room W3/4 Montreal, Quebec CANADA H3A 1B1 |
Tel: 514-398-8885 |