May 2024
I recently awarded the federal Joint Fire Science Program’s Graduate Research Innovation (GRIN) grant for $25,000 for my dissertation work titled “Evaluating How Wildfire Severity Shapes Genetic Diversity for Species Inhabiting Fire Refugia.” In this work, I’m investigating how recent high-severity wildfires in the Northern Rockies are shaping the population genetics of Columbia spotted frogs and long-toed salamanders, two pond-breeding amphibians that are likely sensitive to changing fire regimes across the American West. Funding will be used for sequencing the genetic diversity of montane populations across Idaho and Montana in order to help us understand exactly how genetic diversity is impacted by intensifying disturbance events.
October 2023
A recent article in Nature discusses our upcoming paper on how varying statistical choices can lead to drastically divergent conclusions when investigating the same ecological question among many groups of scientists.
August 2023
A recent news article just published discusses the state of American pikas in Colorado, featuring work from the fantastic Colorado Pika Project and Denver Zoo, Dr. Johanna Varner at Colorado Mesa University, as well as a little of my own research in the Southern Rockies!
July 2023
Our new paper just came out examining non-stationarity in pika-climate relationships across the Southern, Central, and Northern Rocky Mountains! While our findings continue to illustrate the species’ sensitivity to higher temperatures across its geographic range, results also highlight how precipitation both in summer and winter have discordant effects on occupancy and population density in this species depending on the ecoregion.
June 2023
Out now, our new paper in Biological Conservation uses species traits to evaluate how various montane mammals in North America vary in their adaptive capacity (AC) to intensifying climate change. In particular, we focus on American pikas, yellow-bellied marmots, deer mice, golden-mantled ground squirrels, and bushy-tailed woodrats. Beyond the inter-species assessment comparisons, we also assess how AC might vary across species’ geographic ranges within a given species. These findings exemplify how species within given communities or habitats can vary drastically in their ability to cope with climate change.
October 2021
In a new interview with NPR Boise State Public Radio’s Idaho Matters, we discuss with Tom Michael how warming temperatures are pushing American pikas upslope across the eastern portion of the state.
September 2021
Our new paper for my master’s research is officially published in Global Change Biology! This investigation examined how climate change influences- 1) local population densities, 2) occupancy (i.e., where species live now vs in the past), as well as 3) the underlying mechanisms causing widespread upslope retractions across the Northern Rocky Mountains of North America. A pika photo (below) also graced the cover of this month’s issue.
June 2021
New interview on how American pikas serve as an early indicator of how species will respond to climate change moving forward, featured in Colorado 350:
April 2021
I am excited to announce that I will begin my Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in Storrs, CT. Within the EEB Department, I will be working with Dr. Mark Urban to further our understanding of the evolutionary mechanisms that influence species range shifts in response to climate change. Further, I was fortunate enough to be awarded the Jorgensen Fellowship from UConn, which includes $100k over five years. I will also participate in the Team-TERRA NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) from 2021-2023; the primary goals of this project are to understand, predict, and communicate risks to ecosystem services across the northeastern US megalopolis from D.C. to Boston under contemporary climate change and further urbanization.
