What is a meta-ecosystem?
A meta-ecosystem refers to a broader perspective of a landscape—one that considers not just the interactions among species within a single ecosystem, but also the complex exchanges of species, nutrients, and energy across ecosystem boundaries.
Our Research
The EVOME Institute works across all major disciplines of biology to understand how evolution maintains and shapes meta-ecosystems in response to climate change.
Until recently, the prevailing understanding was that ecological resilience can be understood without considering evolution. However, increasing evidence suggests that evolutionary adaptation can occur rapidly, sometimes within only a few generations.
By integrating research from genes to meta-ecosystems, the EVOME Institute strives to understand how ecology and evolution interact across space and time to structure populations, communities, and the physical environment.
Our Questions
Ecological dynamics
How do warmer conditions affect trophic subsidies (resource inputs from outside the ecosystem) and their influence on meta-ecosystem function and population, community, and ecosystem processes?
Landscape variation in traits and genomics
How well-connected are populations? How do traits associated with acquiring, allocating and spending energy and nutrients vary across spatial thermal gradients and gene flow barriers?
Adaptive responses to future climate change
Can existing plasticity or local adaptation of key traits maintain ecosystem function during climate change?
Evolving meta-ecosystems
How will plasticity and evolutionary adaptation interact to rescue and maintain terrestrial-aquatic ecosystem coupling and meta-ecosystem function across landscape scales? How well can we project future changes in the Arctic?