Using global change as a pseudo-experiment to build and test macroecological hypotheses

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Climate and land use changes are known to be causing many species to go extinct. A key challenge for ecologists is to discover ways to prevent such extinctions. This is a complicated job that must take account of species' evolutionary pasts to help predict their future. Making this job even more challenging is the fact that climate changes are leading to combinations of environmental conditions that are different than those in the past. That means that predicting the future requires extrapolation. To help make those predictions more reliable, this research program is pursuing tests of how species have responded to some of the quite dramatic climate changes of recent years, and considering how those changes may reflect the past evolution within particular groups of species throughout the Americas. We are pursuing these questions closer to home also by leading intensive field sampling of butterfly communities in regions where we have seen a lot of climate change in recent years, like western Alberta and the region around Ottawa, and where we also know that many species have begun to respond to climate changes. In other words, field work in these areas is likely to detect the effects we are looking for, if those effects exist at all. By putting different tests of biological mechanisms that may affect how species and whole groups of species respond to climate and land use changes, we hope to arm policy makers with better tools to manage biodiversity at home and abroad.