Flipping through field notebooks…
In a changing climate, a central research goal is to understand whether and how wild populations will persist despite rapid shifts in environmental drivers like precipitation and temperature. As such, many researchers aim to monitor population dynamics across space and time to discern how variation in environmental drivers shape population growth, and use this information to project performance and viability under future climate scenarios. Much less is known, however, about the consequences of environmental change for genetic variation within populations. The extent and persistence of genetic variation in wild populations determines their ability to adapt evolutionarily to changing conditions, and also may directly influence population dynamics and persistence. In this project, I will establish long-term study sites to jointly monitor population dynamics, environmental variation, and genetic variation across a range of populations of the ecological model organism Boechera stricta, a perennial wildflower in the mustard family. These complementary datasets will allow me to directly track how population performance and genetic polymorphism change over time in response to variation in climate variables like precipitation and temperature, and to test for effects between population-level genetic variation and population viability.