Climate change will alter key aspects of the environment for plants, such as temperature and water availability. Very little is known about how plants will contend with these changes, particularly species that are difficult to study, such as long-lived tropical trees. This project examines short-term physiological responses and the potential for long-term evolutionary changes in response to experimental manipulations of precipitation in populations of a tropical oak species that occur in different climates in Central America. We are investigating the extent to which these populations are adapted to the climate they currently experience and their potential response to climates that are similar to those predicted for the future. A critical component of this work is to investigate whether impacts of climate change at the seedling stage enhance or constrain adaptation at later life stages of the tree. We also aim to identify the physiological and genetic mechanisms that enhance or limit adaptation to altered climates in this tropical tree. My lab is leading this 5-year, NSF funded project that brings together researchers from the University of Minnesta, Cornell University, the University of Zamorano in Honduras, the Area Conservacion Guanacaste in Costa Rica, and CIEco-UNAM in Morelia, Mexico.
This is a large, collaborative project including a series of working group meetings funded by the Long-Term Ecological Research Network and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis.
The overarching goal of the workshop series is to increase understanding of the extent to which phylogenetic history influences ecological processes through trait similarities among relatives at regional and continental scales across biomes in North America
Flowering time divergence is a potentially important isolating mechanism allowing the coexistence of sister taxa. The purpose of this collaborative network is to monitor flowering time phenology in live oak species across a latitudinal gradient and to compare phenological variation to interspecific genetic differentiation and climatic patterns.
Live Oak Phenology Network (LOPnet)
