Anthropogenic global change is causing rapid biodiversity loss throughout the world. At the core of our research mission is to gain an improved understanding of the interplay among ecological and evolutionary forces so that we may be able to buy time for threatened populations and potentially facilitate adaptation under rapid global change.

We work with experimental systems to inform basic and applied questions in ecology, evolution, and conservation, as well as with a diverse set of non-model organisms, including other fish, amphibians, reptiles, and birds. We are especially interested in linking evolutionary processes to demography within the context of genetic rescue, which is the compelling idea that population growth rates can increase through the introduction of new genetic material.

Our research is funded by a variety of government agencies and organizations, including: National Science Foundation, National Geographic, The Nature Conservancy, and US Fish & Wildlife Service.

Rapid adaptation has the potential to rescue populations facing novel, stressful environments. Yet, this will only happen if populations can first survive under acutely stressful conditions and also have sufficient genetic variation to respond to selection. Recent evidence suggests that gene flow may be an important source of variation that can result in increased population growth, especially when recipient populations are small and inbred. To what extent does gene flow facilitate adaptation and prevent extinction? This project uses experimental populations of eastern mosquitofish to test how differences in recent evolutionary history (i.e., genetic drift and gene flow) affect adaptive response and persistence in the face of novel stress. This project is funded by the NSF ‘Bridging Ecology and Evolution’ track and is in collaboration with Drs. Betsie Rothermel (Archbold Biological Station) and Gideon Bradburd (Michigan State University).

Developing successful conservation strategies for endangered species that occur in small and isolated populations requires understanding vulnerability to inbreeding depression. Eastern massasauga rattlesnakes exist in isolated patches of highly fragmented habitat, exhibit tiny effective population sizes, and some populations are declining, suggesting that inbreeding depression may be playing a role. In collaboration with Dr. Jen Moore at Grand Valley State University and Dr. Eric Hileman at Mississippi State University, and PhD student Meaghan Clark, we are pairing genomic data with long-term mark-recapture data from two Eastern massasauga rattlesnake populations in Michigan. We will reconstruct wild pedigrees and test for inbreeding depression in these small and fragmented populations. This project is funded by the USFWS Great Lakes Fisheries and Wildlife Restoration Act.

Florida Scrub-Jays are a textbook example of a species that could benefit from assisted migration, given their low dispersal, susceptibility to inbreeding depression, and dependency on a highly fragmented, fire-maintained habitat that has been reduced to less than 10% of its historical range. We are intensively monitoring demographic and genomic consequences of recent translocations of a small number of jays that were introduced to an existing population on the Atlantic coast of Florida. This project is funded by The Nature Conservancy and the US Fish and Wildlife Service and is a collaboration among researchers at Archbold Biological Station, Cornell University, Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, Michigan State University, and University of Rochester.

Harlequin toads in the genus Atelopus is arguably the group hardest hit by the global amphibian decline crisis. Many Atelopus species in Central and South America are thought to have gone extinct in recent decades. Some good news is that a handful of these presumably extinct species have recently been rediscovered. We are investigating the genomic signatures of near-extinction in multiple species of recently rediscovered Harlequin toads in Ecuador. This project is led by PhD candidate Kyle Jaynes and is in collaboration with Dr. Monica Paez-Vacas, Dr. Juan Carlos Santos, Dr. David Salazaar, and the Centro Jambatu for Research and Conservation of Amphibians. This project has received funding from MSU’s Latin Studies Program, National Geographic, and American Society for Icthyology & Herpetology.