Effects of environmental modification and early life stress on wildlife behaviour, physiology, and fitness.

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My research program focuses on the persistent effects of the early-life environment by integrating ecological and physiological perspectives in wild populations. The early-life environment, increasingly shaped by powerful anthropogenic factors, can have lasting effects across an animal's life history stages, but, the downstream influences on individual behaviour, physiology and fitness are not well understood. Over the next five years, my lab will focus on the ultimate and proximate effects of urbanization and agricultural intensification, which are two profound drivers of environmental modification and organisms inhabiting these environments are subject to a suite of novel stressors and selective pressures. Using two well-established model systems (savannah sparrows and grey squirrels), I propose to investigate how early life stress associated with urban and agricultural environments impact wildlife physiology, behaviour and fitness, and how environmental modification impacts the bidirectional relationship between the microbiome and neurophysiology (the gut-brain axis). Evaluating and testing the effects of modified environments on wildlife ecophysiology is a critical dimension of understanding the long-term impacts of environmental change. Our proposed studies on wild, marked, populations provide an unparalleled opportunity to test novel predictions on ecological and physiological outcomes of environmental stress associated with modified landscapes, and, more generally, inform about the mechanisms that organisms use to cope with rapid environmental changes. Further, this research will foster the multidisciplinary skill development of diverse HQP, provide opportunity to engage in public outreach and citizen science, and provide insights for understanding how environmental stress influences the ecophysiology of a range of vertebrate taxa.