My lab is centered around understanding the rules of life that control the expression and number of biological forms in nature, discovering how these rules affect biodiversity over micro- and macro-evolutionary scales, and exposing their relevance for the preservation of extant biodiversity. 

The primary rules of life we study are physiological constraints that are modulated by the environmental availability of key metabolic resources. These ecophysiological constraints alter the amount of energy required for trait synthesis and function and are directly controlled by the environment. Ecophysiological constraints are one of the major factors shaping historical and future predicted spatial patterns of biodiversity, macroevolutionary trait evolution, and population level adaptive divergence/speciation.

Ecophysiological constrained adaptive divergence

The genetic architecture underlying locally adapted traits can provide key clues as to the long-term dynamics of local adaptation and potential for hybrid collapse. One system the lab uses to understand this process are Oreohelix land snails, or the Mountainsnails. Many transitions of ornamented (heavily biomineralized shells) to smooth forms from geographically separated areas, well documented clines of shell expression, and a new genomic assembly allow us to study the process of ecophysiological constraints release as a fine spatial and genomic scale. We aim to understand the explicit mechanisms associated with ecophysiologically constrained morphological divergence and determine whether divergence is significant enough to warrant species recognition. Already we have identified that large structural changes in genome architecture brought about by a massive LTR retrotransposon expansion across the group that has influenced biomineralization gene composition. 

We also use this approach to investigate ecophysiological constraint associated genomic architecture in other gastropod systems (i.e. Bahamian/Floridian Cerion land snails) to understand how different genomic contexts and mineral resources influence the evolvability of ecophysiologically constrained traits.

Spatial ecology and forecasting of ecophysiological constraints

One of the most detectable ecophysiological constraints on traits present in nature is the relationship between the environmental availability of minerals and biomineralization expression. However, the degree to which this constraint limits trait expression amongst different biomineralizing taxa remains unclear. 

At small spatial scales, we use isotope ecology and experimental measures of trait function to quantify causal relationships between macronutrient resources and trait expression.  To study these constraints at a broad spatial scale, we use object detection approaches and other computer vision approaches with large spatial datasets to rapidly quantify the association of species traits with the underlying resources across the landscape. These dual approaches allow us to identify causal relationships between understudied macronutrient sources and trait expression and to predict how entire ecosystems may change as a result of shifts in nutrient availability.

Ongoing work seeks to understand how changes in resource availability alter the expression of traits at a fine scale in the context of energetic costs. That is in calcifying systems, how does the availability of minerals change the cost of calcification? We are currently working to understand these relationships across freshwater, terrestrial, and marine contexts in molluscs.  

Macroevolutionary dynamics of ecophysiological constraints

All life has evolved within a fluctuating set of environmental constraints which modulate the expression of forms in nature. While widely acknowledged as factors influencing the evolution of traits across macroevolutionary time, there are few phylogenetic comparative methods which incorporate temporal environmental data in trait evolution. This methodological gap is particularly problematic for the study of ecophysiologically constrained traits, traits whose expression is constrained by the availability of key metabolic resources in the environment (e.g. biomineralization and mineral availability). Ecophysiological trait expression can directly affect the available niche spaces of lineages as their expression is often tightly linked to organismal survival. To address this gap, we develop models that utilizes temporal environmental data of ecophysiological constrained traits to estimate how the environment may alter macroevolutionary parameters of Ornstein-Uhlenbeck models of trait evolution.

Phylogeography and the movement of species

It is difficult to piece together the evolution of ecophysiology in the absence of also understanding the phylogeographic or demographic context of populations and species. We work and collaborate with other labs to study the phylogeography of groups spanning Galapagos Naesiotus to Asian ancient lake endemic Viviparidae. We are currently working towards expanding this approach across the SW Sky-Islands of New Mexico in different land snail groups (i.e. Ashmunella).