Dr. Amy WhippleEvolutionary EcologyMerriam-Powell Center for Environmental Research My main areas of research interest are the evolutionary ecology of species reacting to climate change, environmental contamination, and interactions with other species. In the context of IGERT I am interested in scales from the molecular mechanisms that constrain and enable adaptations to the landscape consequences of evolved changes in dominant species. I am collaborating with researchers who have examined the environmental controls on interactions among pinyon trees, fungi, bacteria, arthropods, and vertebrates through NSF-LTREB funded monitoring efforts and long-term experiments for two decades. This work suggests the importance of genetically-based resistance traits in piñyon pines on community and ecosystem processes (Swaty et al. 2004; Haskins and Gehring 2004). With recent development of sequencing methods for candidate genes for drought and herbivore tolerance we expect to be able to begin to make connections between genetically-based variation in tolerance and traits such as growth, survival, and reproduction of pinyon tree. We are also developing proposals to study how herbivores, habitat, and drought are shaping the evolution of piñyon trees. By examining the distribution of genes across the landscape we plan to address questions such as: “How does the evolutionary potential of pinyon affect their expecting future distribution on the landscape?”
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