In many species, early life experiences have striking effects on health, reproduction, and survival in adulthood. Thus, early life conditions shape a range of evolutionarily relevant traits, and in doing so alter ...

This dissertation focuses on the implications of habitat change in freshwater ecosystems. Habitat change has three primary components that are inextricably connected; habitat loss, alteration, and fragmentation. Habitat ...

Landscape genomics is an emerging field that investigates how environmental features drive patterns of neutral and adaptive genetic variation across landscapes. Importantly, landscape genomics can provide insight into the ...

What evolutionary processes and ecological patterns underlie the maintenance of asexual reproduction in natural populations? Although a vast body of literature offers theory to explain the existence of sexual and asexual ...

All organisms live in complex habitats that shape the course of their evolution by altering the phenotype expressed by a given genotype (a phenomenon known as phenotypic plasticity) and simultaneously by determining the ...

Closely related, ecologically similar species are often separated at a small scale while being broadly sympatric. In Northern California’s coast range two monkeyflower species, Mimulus guttatus and Mimulus nudatus co-occur ...

Diversity in coloration is a common phenomenon in marine invertebrates, although the ecological significance of the diversity is often unknown. Patterns of geographic variability, particularly with respect to color phenotypes, ...

Understanding forces creating or maintaining the vast amount of biodiversity has been a major task of biologists. Genetic variation plays a major role in the creation of biodiversity because in contrast to environmental ...

One of the major goals of evolutionary biology is understanding the process of species formation. There is particular interest in how selection can favor species formation through the process of reinforcement. When two ...

The capacity of marine organisms to adapt to natural and anthropogenic stressors is an integral component of ocean health. Harmful algal blooms (HABs), which are one of many growing threats in coastal marine ecosystems, ...