Biodiversity is increasingly threatened by global change, but the consequences of climate change for species, communities, and ecosystems are not yet fully understood. Work in the lab focuses on understanding the implications of changing climatic conditions for distributions and phenology of organisms and the resulting reshuffling of ecological communities.
Project 1: Macroecology of breeding birds of New York State: Influences of climate change, land cover dynamics, and spatial scale
In this NASA-funded project, we explore the consequences of global change for ecological communities across New York. Specifically, we investigate effects of land cover and change in climate on the temporal turnover, extinction, and colonization patterns of birds and found that fragmented landscapes support assemblages that are more robust to climate change than assemblages in contiguous habitats. Consequently, and conservation actions must take such heterogeneous ecological responses into account.
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Funding: NASA
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Collaborators: Bill Porter (Michigan State), Benjamin Zuckerberg (Wisconsin-Madison), Giorgos Mountrakis (SUNY ESF), Brian Maurer (Michigan State), Andrew Finley (Michigan State).
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Publications: Jarzyna et al. 2015, GCB; Jarzyna et al. 2015, GEB; Jarzyna et al. 2016, Landscape Ecology.
Project 2: Species on the Move
Pervasive shifts in species’ distributions are widely recognized as a fingerprint of climate change, but the mechanisms driving such range shifts remain poorly understood. In 2016, a group of scientists and natural resource managers working in the disciplines of global change, biogeography and evolution, and biodiversity management and conservation got together to identify the consequences of such species redistribution for ecosystems and human livelihoods. The meeting was a part of the Species on the Move conference organized by the University of Tasmania, Australia.
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Funding: Yale Climate and Energy Institute, University of Tasmania
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Collaborators: Gretta Pecl (UTAS), Miguel Araujo (University of Madrid), I-Ching Chen (National Cheng Kun University), Mao-Ning Tuanmu (Academia Sinica), Timothy Bonebrake (University of Hong Kong), Robert Colwell (UConn), Cascade Sorte (UC Irvine), and many others.
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Publications: Pecl et al. 2017, Science; Bonebrake et al. 2018, Biological Reviews.