biogeography under climate change
broadly, my research aims to understand how climate and climate change influence
how species live, where they are, and where they may one day be.
Conservation & Spatial Planning
Impacts of climate change on ecosystems will be heterogeneous across Earth's surface, and lead to losses, gains, extirpations, and new opportunities that differ across regions. One central pillar of my research is understanding predicted ecological changes across space and developing strategies to adapt to future ecosystems.
For example, Canada contains the coldest sections of the majority of its resident species' distribution ranges, and might therefore become more suitable for species if temperatures across the country warm. This might translate to increased species richness, increased populations, and new resources as species shift towards newly-suitable environments. However, introduction of new species could also threaten existing Canadian biodiversity and established resource management and conservation plans, which were developed under the assumption that species' ranges will remain in place. My research uses models of projected species' distributions in present and future climates to develop strategies for managing, conserving, and monitoring biodiversity on the move.
Lawlor 2024, Canadian Climate Adaptation Report
Species Redistributions Under Climate Change
Climate change is driving species to new regions in order to remain in tolerable conditions. Many of my research projects seek to detect range shifts that have occurred, understand why detections don't always align with predictions, and use imperfect data collected across space and time to anticipate the future in ecology.
In collaboration with the BIOSHIFTS working group, I led a project to review detections of climate-driven redistributions that have already occurred, finding that only 59% of global range shift documentations align with the directions expected under climate change. While many of these expectation-contrary range shifts could be due to complicating factors like biotic interactions, climate refugia, or range thermal range underfilling, others might be products of data limitations for accurately detecting change. In the manuscript, we discuss anticipated mechanisms, methodological constraints, and impacts of range shift detections. As part of this work, I also led the development of the `BioShiftR` R package to share the our "new and improved" database of range shift detections globally.
Some of my related projects in this field focus on identifying how extrinsic and intrinsic factors can influence range shift rates, identifying impacts of data structures and limitations on range shift detections, and outlining alternate pathways for inferring biogeographical change when data to detect wholesale shifts is insufficient.
Lawlor et al. 2024, Nature Reviews Earth & Environment
Comte et al. 2024, Global Change Biology
BioShiftR R Package
Marine Larvae in Changing Oceans
My masters research sought to understand effects of multiple climate stressors on growth and survival of marine invertebrate larvae. During this project, I designed a novel experimental system to culture oyster larvae in interacting gradients of temperature, salinity, and ocean acidification. Measurements of daily growth rate and percent mortality from 50 unique experimental treatments formed the training dataset to fit statistical models describing larval responses across this 3-dimensional treatment gradient. We then used these models to predict larval success at oyster restoration sites in Washington State now and in the future.
We found that oyster larvae in the Salish Sea are sensitive to temperature and salinity, but tolerant of acidification, and may actually benefit from some degree of global climate change in Washington State.
Ongoing work on this project asks how these changes in growth and survival will affect dispersal and population distribution of the species in future oceans.
Lawlor & Arellano 2020, Scientific Reports
