University of Michigan
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Stephen J. Tonsor, Associate Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Pittsburgh

Abstract
Both the beginnings and the end of biodiversity are often associated with shifts in environmental conditions. My lab is interested in the evolutionary processes associated with organismal responses to changing environments. In my seminar, I will touch on three areas of recent and ongoing work. I will first show that species ranges increase over millions to tens of millions of years, a dynamic that we hypothesize results from slow adaptation to conditions at the edges of the range. I will then focus on our work exploring the functional basis of adaptation across a strong gradient in climate and elevation in Arabidopsis. Lastly, I will discuss our work on the plasticity of evolvability and constraints on the evolvability of plasticity across environmental gradients, with emphasis on our work on evolvability across resource supply gradients. Our work on evolutionary expansion of the range in Arabidopsis will be compared to recent work in other species by other labs, speculating that the selfing mating system, relatively low migration and plastic genetic architecture we observe in Arabidopsis suggests that similar weedy species may be at an advantage in a world of changing climates.

Host: Deborah Goldberg

Coffee and cookies will be served at 4 p.m.