Ecology and Evolution Seminar Series
Body
Seminars from the RSB Division of Ecology and Evolution (E&E).
Upcoming events
I will talk about how deep geological and climatic history has shaped the genetic architecture of Australian fauna, with a focus on two contrasting systems: the arid zone and the Australian alps.
This thesis examines the effect of climate change on a high-elevation ecosystem of Australia. It is expected that increases in temperature and changes in rainfall patterns will strongly influence both plant communities and the soil environments that support them.
Past events
My research contributes to broader insights into sexual selection, life-history evolution, and the potential impacts of environmental change on reproductive dynamics in natural populations.
Plants employ a suite of gene regulatory mechanisms that enable them to occupy a diverse range of environments and respond to ongoing perturbations.
Multilevel societies—where social groups show intergroup tolerance and repeatedly associate and merge with specific other groups—are among the most complex forms of social systems in vertebrates.
As genomic data have become increasingly cheap to generate, they have seen a range of new uses for understanding pest populations.
The molecular clock hypothesis proposes that evolutionary change occurs as a temporally regular process, occurring at a rate that might fluctuate through time, but still remains more-or-less consistent.
Phenotypic plasticity is an important adaptation for organisms that live under fluctuating environmental conditions.
In this presentation, I show that geographically widespread triploid parthenogenetic forms of the Australian gekkonid Heteronotia binoei are considerably diverse despite their clonal reproductive mode, with patterns of SNP variation consistent with two previously identified reciprocal hybrid origins and numerous backcrossing events.
Hybridisation events – together with other biological processes such as recombination and incomplete lineage sorting – can create gene tree discordance, where different genomic regions describe different evolutionary histories.
The repeated, independent evolution of similar traits in different species is a fascinating phenomenon that affords deep insights into the relative importance of deterministic vs. stochastic forces in evolution.
In this talk, I introduce how white-winged choughs, highly social cooperative breeders, integrate multiple features of alarm and contact communication to coordinate antipredator behaviour and maintain cohesion.
Developmental conditions are powerful drivers of phenotypic plasticity. Environmental factors, such as temperature, can directly program fitness-associated phenotypes, while maternal effects act as indirect cues that shape the developmental environment.
Species distribution models (SDMs) are widely used across fields as diverse as ecology, archaeology, epidemiology, and conservation biology.