The Buckley lab combines modelling, field and lab collection of ecological and physiological data, and ecoinformatics to examine how biology (morphology, physiology, and life history) determines an organism’s ecological and evolutionary responses to environmental change.  We integrate approaches from physiological ecology and evolution, population and community ecology, and biogeography. A focus is characterizing how organisms experience and respond to fine scale spatial and temporal environmental variation. Much of our recent work has entailed repeating functional experiments and observations on montane insects after several decades of climate change to assess ecological and evolutionary responses and test predictive models. The TrEnCh project builds computational and visualization tools to Translate Environmental Change into organismal responses and improve capacity for ecological and evolutionary forecasting.

Questions we’ve worked on recently include:

• How does local adaptation across a species’ range influence responses to climate change?
• How does thermoregulatory behavior alter the evolution of thermal tolerances and climate change impacts over the short and long term?
• How does thermal exposure and sensitivity vary across the life cycle and what are the implications for demography and distributions?
• What are the implications of developmental plasticity for phenology and demography in changing environments?
• What are the relative impacts of acute (extremes) and chronic (means) climate conditions on demography and distributions?
• How does climate variability influence plastic and evolutionary responses to climate change?