Seminar from Sara Smith, Department of Biology, Mount Royal U

Biology seminar series, Sara Smith

This week we will have a seminar from Sara Smith, Department of Biology, Mount Royal U..

There will be coffee and snacks before the seminar. Please bring your own mug.

Thursday 4:00PM, HSC 1A5 and on zoom (Passcode: cElegans)

Looking Forward: How ecological genomics can inform conservation decisions in the face of climate change

Climate change poses a number of abiotic and biotic challenges to organisms attempting to persist in rapidly changing environments. Species distribution models (SDMs) are widely used to predict range shifts but could be unreliable under climate change scenarios because they do not account for evolution. By incorporating physiological and behavioural traits into SDMs, as well as estimates of how these traits may evolve under different climate change scenarios, this seminar presents a foundation for creating more informed models of species persistence with empirical evidence and discusses the role of mechanistic SDMs in highlighting populations of conservation concern in the face of climate change.