Awardee: Lauren Glevanik
Bio:
Lauren is a PhD candidate in Dr. Nathan Kraft’s plant ecology lab in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA. She works with a plant community of annual wildflowers and grasses at Sedgwick Reserve in Santa Barbara County to answer questions about how seed dispersal influences biodiversity both locally and across landscapes. She integrates empirical data with modeling to investigate how variation in seed dispersal patterns among species enhance or diminish coexistence. This research informs broader applications in range shift modeling, seed-based restoration, conservation, and reserve management.
Project:
Under the threat of a changing climate, species face three options: migrate, adapt, or risk extinction. For plants rooted in place, seed dispersal is often the only opportunity for movement within a lifetime. Dispersal potential often depends on how well a plant performs in a given patch, as plant traits that impact dispersal (e.g. seed weight, plant height) are directly impacted by both abiotic and biotic stressors. Shifts in these physical traits could offer a plant the chance to escape local conditions where it performs poorly, or to improve seedling establishment through increased provisioning of the seed. This research aims to quantify species responses under a competitor stress gradient, providing insight into how drastically seed dispersal could shift under stress and accelerate species responses to unfavorable conditions.