Biology Seminar | Dr. Samuel Fey | Reed College | Impacts of environmental variation on populations and communities: from the everyday to the rare.

Early Career Seminars are a mini-series within the Biology Seminar Series in which postdocs from Duke Biology invite researchers that have recently started positions at a variety of types of institutions (R1/R2 universities, industry, government, etc.) to discuss their research as well as the process of transitioning into these positions.

Abstract: A comprehensive understanding of ecology requires discovering how ecological processes unfold in variable environments. I will present research conducted at different scales of environmental variation to build an understanding of how populations and communities respond to, and are shaped, by variation across time and space. First, I will consider how gradual phenotypic adjustments by organisms in response to temporal environmental variation can alter ecological processes, and secondly will consider how extreme environmental events can contribute to the occurrence of animal mass mortality events, and how such events can influence community dynamics. This research will focus on freshwater plankton communities and combine inference from lab and field experiments, observational studies, and mathematical models.