Biological Impacts of Climate Change in California Program
PRBO has coordinated new climate change research in collaboration with the California Energy Commission's Public Interest Energy Research Environmental Area (PIEREA). On the recommendation of global warming expert Terry Root, PhD, PIEREA selected PRBO to award $500,000 in research grants to graduate students and post-doctoral scientists in California. This new program, Biological Impacts of Climate Change in California, will gain understanding of effects on the state's flora and fauna, foster a new group of interdisciplinary scientist, and result in a collection of findings co-edited by Dr. Root and Dr. Kimberly R. Hall. PRBO senior scientists Mark Herzog, Chrissy Howell, and Geoff Geupel will mentor young researchers awarded grants.
For information on the Energy Research Environmental Area and PRBO Conservation Science: Biological Impacts of Climate Change in California (BICCCA) Research Grants, please click here.
Contact: Mark Herzog, mherzog at prbo dot org, (707) 781-2555 x308
To view the list of participants, click here. If a participant's name is highlighted, click on it to view their personal website.
The Participants
Jessica Blois
(full scholarship)
Jessica Blois is a fourth-year graduate student at Stanford University broadly interested in the influence of space and time on the evolution and ecology of populations and species. She received her undergraduate degree in Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution from U.C. San Diego in 2000, after which she worked for the Forest Service in Oregon and northern California for 2 years. She received her Master’s degree from Humboldt State University in 2005, where she worked with Brian Arbogast and investigated the relative utility of mtDNA and AFLP in assessing patterns of genetic variation in an endemic arboreal vole, Arborimus pomo, from northern California. Jessica's dissertation research at Stanford focuses on how small mammals have responded to environmental change over the past 20,000 years, a time period that encompasses the important Pleistocene-Holocene transition. She is approaching this issue by assembling population and community level abundance, morphologic, and hopefully genetic data from fossil and modern small mammals in one region of northern California. Her overall goals are to better understand how small mammals responded to past climatic, vegetation, and community change in order to better predict the effects of current and future environmental change on species.
click [here] for Jessica Blois' summary of research
Laurie Koteen
(full Scholarship)
Laurie Koteen is a doctoral student in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on changes in the patterns and processes of terrestrial ecosystems in the context of global climate change and biological invasion. Her current study emphasizes the role of introduced grasses in California in changing ecosystem nutrient and energy flows in ways that impact climate change. Her interests extend to understanding the mechanisms by which ecosystems respond to climate change and biological invasion, ecosystem resistance and resilience to change, biodiversity loss and feedbacks to global climate change. Laurie's research draws primarily from the fields of biogeochemistry, biometeorology and plant community ecology and relies on both observational and manipulative approaches.
click [here] for Laurie Koteen's summary of research
Morgan Tingley is an ornithologist and conservation biologist with research focusing primarily on how birds respond to anthropogenically induced environmental conditions. He is interested in the ecology of range, niche, and distribution, and how these characteristics mutate as conditions such as habitat and climate are altered. He received his B.A. in Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard University in 2003. After spending a year at the University of Oxford to receive a Masters of Science (M.Sc.) in Zoology, Morgan returned to the US where he was an environmental consultant for the EPA. In the fall of 2005, he moved to California where he started his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in the department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. Working with his advisor, Steve Beissinger, and with the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UCB, his thesis work seeks to understand how bird species in the Sierra Nevada mountains have responded to climate change in the last century.
click [here] for Morgan Tingley's summary of research
Publications:
Tingley, M.W., W.B. Monahan, S.R. Beissinger, and C. Moritz. 2009. Birds track their Grinnellian niche through a century of climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 106(suppl. 2):19637-19643.
Tingley, M.W., and S.R. Beissinger. 2009. Detecting range shifts from historical species occurrences: new perspectives on old data. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 24(11): 625-633.
Lori Hargrove is currently in the PhD program in ecology and evolutionary biology under the direction of Dr. John Rotenberry at UC Riverside. She expects to complete her degree in spring 2009. She received a B.A. in biological sciences at UC Santa Barbara in 1988 and worked as a field biologist for Varanus Biological Services and the San Diego Natural History Museum. Her research interests include: (1) Biogeography and range boundaries – what are the limiting processes? (2) Ecology, distribution, and biodiversity of chaparral and desert scrub bird species in California – what are the effects of climate change, fire, and habitat fragmentation? (3) Breeding versus wintering ecology of neotropical migrants – how do factors in the wintering environment affect the ecology of the breeding season, and vice versa? Lori's dissertation research examines how breeding distributions of bird species shift in relation to climate change along an arid elevation gradient.
click [here] for Lori Hargrove's summary of research
Jason Sexton is currently working towards a PhD in Conservation Biology with the Ecology Graduate Group at U.C. Davis. His research focuses on climate adaptation and gene flow of Mimulus lacinatus, an endemic Sierran annual plant. He is also currently a trainee in the NSF Biological Invasions Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) Program, where his cohort is investigating the practical and social aspects that govern weed management, specifically yellow starthistle, in the Sierran foothill ranching community.
click [here] for Jason Sexton's summary of research
Blake Suttle
(full scholarship)
Blake Suttle is currently a post doctoral research associate at U.C. Berkeley in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science & National Center for Earth Surface Dynamics. He earned his B.S. in Biology from Yale University and his PhD from the Department of Integrative Biology at U.C. Berkeley. His research focuses on anthropogenic impacts on ecosystems. Blake is interested in applied questions of how ecological communities respond to changing climate, habitat degradation, and loss of predator species.
click [here] for Blake Suttle's summary of research
Stephanie Stuart is currently a PhD Student in the Ackerly Lab at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on plant adaptation to cold. The focus of her dissertation research is understanding the evolution of freezing tolerance in flowering plants (angiosperms). She is interested in the interaction of ecological and evolutionary time scales, and in macroevolutionary patterns of change in physiological traits. She is currently employed as a Graduate Student Researcher for "An annual grassland exploration of scaling from genomes to ecosystem function." Her past research experience includes museum curation and an independent effort to place fossil Azolla in a phylogenetic context at the University of California Museum of Paleontology and research assistant in Dr. Sarah Mathew's Lab at the Arnold Arboretum on projects including phylogenetic sequencing and alignment of phytochromes, plant pigments that sense light. As an undergraduate and post graduate, she investigated the latitudinal limits of mangrove forests. Her first venture into the field was as a research assistant for Dr. Matthew V. Thompson in the Parque National Pan de Azúcar, Chile, where she helped him build a whether station, measure stem water potential, and dig several large holes.
click [here] for Stephanie Stuart's summary of research
Park WIlliams has been a graduate student in the Geography Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara since September 2003. He received an MA degree in September 2006 and has been working on his Ph.D. for one year. Park's advisor is Dr. Chris Still. His general research interests are in Biogeography and Climate. He is especially interested in how large-scale climate processes affect what can grow where and in how we can use our knowledge of what is growing where, or what used to grow where, to infer information about climate.
click [here] for Park Williams' summary of research
Alden Griffith
(travel award)
Alden Griffith is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz. His research focuses on the invasion of the annual grass Bromus tectorum at the ecotone of the Great Basin Desert and eastern Sierra Nevada. His interests fall into three main categories: 1) The impact of snow depth and interannual climate variability on B. tectorum populations, 2) The facilitative influence of native shrubs on B. tectorum, and 3) The role of phenotypic plasticity and local adaptation between native and introduced populations of B. tectorum.
click [here] for Alden Griffith's summary of research
Rebecca Quiñones
(travel award)
Rebecca Quinones is currently in the first year of the doctoral program in Ecology at the University of California at Davis. Prior to her returning to school, she was working as a fisheries biologist for the Klamath National Forest and has continued in that capacity while working towards her degree. In 1996, she began studying salmon conservation in California while at Humboldt State University (2002 Master’s Degree), with emphasis on resource use and conservation. Her research interests include salmonid habitat use, stressors to salmon recovery and restoration implementation. Her goal is to compile all available information that describes changes to physical parameters associated with global climate change for the Salmon, Scott and Shasta River watersheds. She expects that information resulting from the study will facilitate informed decisions concerning resource management and promote habitat restoration and salmonid conservation in watersheds.
click [here] for Rebecca Quiñones' summary of research
Judsen Bruzgul
(travel award)
Judsen Bruzgul was raised in Orchard Park, a small town outside of Buffalo, NY. He attended Middlebury College in Vermont and since graduating in 1998 he has made his home throughout the western US. Judsen is currently in his fourth year of a PhD in ecology and evolution at Stanford University. His research focuses on defining California's present animal communities and predicting their responses to future climate change using models. He believes that investigating species diversity over large areas will offer useful insight into the mechanisms that create and maintain patterns of biodiversity. He is also very interested in the growing role of private lands for conservation of species diversity and ecosystem function or services. While his dissertation research keeps him rather busy, he tries to fill any free hours with a variety of activities including running, road biking, gardening, climbing, reading, taking pictures, cooking, and writing.
click [here] for Judsen Bruzgul's summary of research
Brenden Colloran
(full scholarship)
Brendan Colloran received a Bachelor of Liberal Arts from Hampshire College, where he studied the philosophy of science as a Johnson Scholar. He is currently a UBM Science Scholar at San Francisco State University, where he is pursuing a master’s degree in mathematics. His research interests include mathematical ecology and economics, and interdisciplinary work that explores the connections between these fields. Brenden is pursuing research that will use mathematical models of bumble bee communities to examine the effects of both mild and severe climate change scenarios on bumble bee populations in the Sierra Nevada. Bumble bees (genus Bombus; ~250 species worldwide) are one of the most important groups of pollinators for both native flora and crops, and populations are declining worldwide.
click [here] Brenden Colloran's summary of research
Jeff Dorman
(full scholarship)
Jeff Dorman received a B.A. in biology from Gettysburg College in 1992 and discovered an interest in ocean sciences while teaching at environmental education centers in Big Pine Key, Florida and on Catalina Island off the coast of California (1992-1995). His exposure to biological oceanography and zooplankton ecology came while working as a scientist and teaching for the college study abroad program Sea Education Association, based in Woods Hole, MA (1997-2000). He earned a M.A. in marine biology at San Francisco State University in 2002. While there he worked with Dr. Steve Bollens as part of the Coastal Ocean Processes / Wind Events and Shelf Transport (CoOP/WEST) project, an interdisciplinary project that examined the impact of wind driven transport on productivity of the shelf region of the northern California Current. His specific research involved working on the short time-scale (weekly) impacts of wind events on the population biology of the krill species Euphausia pacifica. Jeff is currently a Ph.D.
student, advised by Dr. Thomas Powell, at the University of California, Berkeley,
studying the impacts of coastal circulation on zooplankton using individual-based
population biology models.
click [here] for Jeff Dorman's summary of research
Chris Osovitz
(full scholarship)
Chris Osovitz is presently a Doctoral Candidate in Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology at the Universtiy of California, Santa Barbara. He received his B.S. in Zoology from the University of Florida with honors and his A.A. from Daytona Beach Community College with high honors. His research interests primarily lie in investigating the cellular and physiological underpinnings of organismal and ecological traits. Chris' dissertation work centered on how gene expression was effected by variation in natural environmental variation across the range of the purple sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus. He believes that a multidisciplinary approach which includes a physiological perspective can greatly facilitate the understanding of a species’ ecology.
click [here] for Chris Osovitz's summary of research
