From Genes to Urban Areas: Applications of Spatial Modeling to Assess Climate Change Vulnerability in Natural and Built Systems

Abstract

Over the last decade, ecology and related fields have benefited from explosive growth of spatially referenced biological and environmental data sets, including climate scenarios for the last 22,000 years to the late 21st century. At the same time, spatial modeling methods have been developed to combine these data to better understand and map drivers of biodiversity across space and through time. To date, most studies have considered species as the primary focus or response variable, but increasingly there is interest in modeling entities above and below the species level, most notably genomic variation within species and species assemblages. This talk will cover several recent studies on these themes, including (1) a project on methods for incorporating relevant population-level genetic variation into biogeographical models of species responses to climate change and (2) a model intercomparision study examining how climate novelty will degrade our ability to anticipate climate change impacts on natural systems. Lastly, I will discuss how methods developed in biogeography can be used to better communicate to the public the implications of climate change in urban areas.  

Presenters

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A headshot of Matt Fitzpatrick

Matthew C. Fitzpatrick

Dr. Matthew C. Fitzpatrick is Associate Professor at the Appalachian Laboratory of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Frostburg, Maryland. He is a quantitative global change ecologist interested in how climate drives ecological patterns and processes, with an emphasis on understanding the distribution of species, patterns of biodiversity, and range expansion of native and introduced organisms. He has worked in both terrestrial and aquatic systems and across scales of biological organization from genes within genomes to species assemblages across the globe...

Image
A headshot of Matt Fitzpatrick

Matthew C. Fitzpatrick

Dr. Matthew C. Fitzpatrick is Associate Professor at the Appalachian Laboratory of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Frostburg, Maryland. He is a quantitative global change ecologist interested in how climate drives ecological patterns and processes, with an emphasis on understanding the distribution of species, patterns of biodiversity, and range expansion of native and introduced organisms. He has worked in both terrestrial and aquatic systems and across scales of biological organization from genes within genomes to species assemblages across the globe. Fitzpatrick holds a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Tennessee and held a postdoctoral position at the Harvard Forest. He was a Distinguished Visiting Researcher at CSIRO Land & Water in Canberra, Australia from 2017–2018.

Presenters
Matthew C. Fitzpatrick, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, Appalachian Laboratory
Date
Time
11:00 a.m. ET
Location
SESYNC – 1 Park Place, Suite 300 Annapolis, MD 21401
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