What do fish and flowers have in common?

DEC 18, 2017     by REBECCA DALTON

I have answered this question more times than I can count since September. My colleagues, friends, and family members have been curious as to why someone who studies plants, can suddenly switch to studying fish for a semester.

Since starting graduate school, I have been studying how climate change affects the time when plants begin flowering, and how the timing of flowering affects plant-pollinator and plant-plant interactions. Specifically, warming temperatures are causing some flowering species to emerge and reproduce earlier in the season, while others respond to warming temperature by emerging later. If different species in the same place respond unequally to the same environmental cues, populations might experience higher levels of competition for shared resources than in the past. Read More >>