UC Davis Chancellor Gary May interviewed Rachael Bay as part of his series, Face to Face. Chancellor May learned about corals, climate change, getting undergrads into research in genomics, and a bit of what it's like to be one of Popular Science magazine's "Brilliant 10."
Bumble bees are some of the world’s most important pollinators, yet many bumble bee species are in decline. Our understanding of how landscape changes affect bumble bees is often limited to studies of where they forage on flowers. Through this project, REU students will test how bumble bees use landscapes throughout their life cycles. Students will compare the behavior and abundance of bumble bees across habitat types. We hypothesize that bees use different habitat types for nesting vs.
Seagrasses form vast underwater meadows that provide habitat for countless other organisms and directly influence key ecosystem processes like carbon storage and erosion control. But seagrasses are also under threat from human-caused changes in the environment such as warming temperature and cloudy water. Jay Stachowicz seeks to understand how genetic diversity within eelgrass, a seagrass found throughout the northern hemisphere, provides resilience to this species and the ecosystems it supports.
As crops have dispersed across the globe, they have had to adapt to a wide range of novel conditions. As climates change, crop plants will be forced to adapt or face local extinction.
Ben Sacks uses genetic and genomic tools to conduct research that advances both the persistence of wild mammal biodiversity and our basic understanding of mammal evolution and ecology.
Jennifer Funk studies how plant traits influence ecological processes including drought response, plant invasion, and ecological restoration. Students involved in this work would engage in greenhouse and field projects, with coupled physiological and community-level measurements in a variety of plant communities, from California grasslands to tropical forest understories.
Andrew Whitehead seeks to understand how genomes integrate cues from, respond to, and are shaped by the external environment. Students in his lab examine genomic responses to stress that occur over both physiological timescales (acclimation responses) and evolutionary timescales (adaptive responses).
Behavioral plasticity offers one mechanism through which organisms can immediately respond to changes in their environment. But why are some individuals more plastic than others? What determines the extent and direction of behavioral plasticity? EERREC REU students will study how experience with early-life stress can shape the expression of behavioral plasticity and thus an individual's ability to cope with later environmental change.
Around the world, climate change has caused differences in mean temperature and precipitation, but also variation in the scale and timing of climatic events. The timing of weather events, such as germination-triggering rains, the melting of snowpack, and freeze or thaw cycles often have major effects on organisms that must synchronize birth, growth, and reproduction with favorable conditions. The timing of these events -- phenology -- in turn affects how individuals interact with their abiotic and biotic environment.
Ongoing climate change will continue to increase the frequency and intensity of extreme climate events, such as heat waves and droughts, with potentially wide-ranging consequences for species interactions. Temperature and moisture availability strongly affect the development of both monarch butterflies and their milkweed host plants, but the role of extreme climate events is less well characterized.
Two plausible hypotheses in the monarch-milkweed system center on heat waves:
Balancing energy demand with energy supply is a critical component of being physiologically robust to changes in environmental conditions; however, the inability to maintain this energy balance may limit the capacity of fishes to acclimate to multiple co-occurring stressors associated with climate change. If species cannot metabolically reorganize to reestablish homeostasis following exposure to stressors, the energy demand required to cope with shifts in environmental conditions may outpace energy supply.
What defines the limits to a species’ geographic range?
Fundamentally, a population fails to expand when it cannot achieve a positive growth rate beyond its current limits. The conditions under which this occurs can embody virtually all components of a species’ biology, making range limits an ideal testing ground for studies of the ecological and evolutionary impacts of nearly every imaginable form of rapid environmental change.
