Plant life histories & climate change
Climate change has the potential to shift plant life-histories and reproductive strategies, including the size or timing of when individuals start reproducing, how much energy they allocate to reproduction and how many times they reproduce over their lifetime. These changes ultimately can alter population dynamics or local persistence. Assessing how a changing climate impacts life histories and phenology, and the implications for both individuals and populations, is a key first step in conserving species in a rapidly changing world.
A part of understanding the selective forces that shape reproductive strategies is understanding reproductive trade-offs. When the cost of reproduction is non-lethal, as in most perennial plants, costs are more difficult to detect and more challenging to incorporate into demographic models. We are using the rainfall manipulation experiment in the Garry Oak ecosystem to more explicitly evaluate how climate influences both costs and population persistence with a combination of models and experiments in a suite of perennial plants. Herbivores can also influence costs of reproduction by consuming flowers and seeds, and thus have the potential to influence life history as well as population growth. PhD student Jenna Loesberg is looking at herbivore impacts on the reproductive success of a Garry Oak perennial forb and the implications for plant population persistence within a changing climate.
Previously, in collaboration with Tom Miller (Rice University), we built non-lethal costs of reproduction into demographic models to determine the optimal size at flowering and optimal reproductive effort. Using this novel framework, we investigated how environmental stochasticity and climate influence optimal strategies in lady orchid. You can read more about this and other related work here, here & here.
A part of understanding the selective forces that shape reproductive strategies is understanding reproductive trade-offs. When the cost of reproduction is non-lethal, as in most perennial plants, costs are more difficult to detect and more challenging to incorporate into demographic models. We are using the rainfall manipulation experiment in the Garry Oak ecosystem to more explicitly evaluate how climate influences both costs and population persistence with a combination of models and experiments in a suite of perennial plants. Herbivores can also influence costs of reproduction by consuming flowers and seeds, and thus have the potential to influence life history as well as population growth. PhD student Jenna Loesberg is looking at herbivore impacts on the reproductive success of a Garry Oak perennial forb and the implications for plant population persistence within a changing climate.
Previously, in collaboration with Tom Miller (Rice University), we built non-lethal costs of reproduction into demographic models to determine the optimal size at flowering and optimal reproductive effort. Using this novel framework, we investigated how environmental stochasticity and climate influence optimal strategies in lady orchid. You can read more about this and other related work here, here & here.