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Webinars

Please join us for the upcoming webinar on September 16, 2020: 12-1pm (Pacific Time), 3-4pm (Eastern Time).

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Factors and Dynamics Affecting Species’ Adaptive Capacity to Climate Change by Erik Beever

Abstract: Wildlife and land managers desire rules of thumb or patterns that might indicate which species and populations are more vulnerable to contemporary global change, and which are more likely to be able to accommodate and cope with such change. Results of recent and ongoing research on mountain-dwelling animals illustrate how species are responding to contemporary global change – both in terms of local distributional losses and of surprising exceptions to the ‘rules’. Dr. Beever will use examples from across western North America to illustrate weather-based stress and refugial dynamics at multiple scales. The presentation will share ideas that challenge the assumption of spatial and temporal niche conservatism. It will end with a global, all-taxa investigation of the factors and dynamics that affect species’ adaptive capacity.

Bio: Dr. Erik Beever is a Research Ecologist at the Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center of the U.S. Geological Survey and is Affiliate Faculty in the Ecology Department at Montana State University. He has performed field research on plants, soils, most vertebrate clades (especially mammals), and insects, and in a range of ecosystems of the western hemisphere. He also seeks to understand mechanisms of biotic responses to long-term weather patterns and variability, and monitoring in conservation reserves, all at community to landscape scales, as well as other topics of conservation ecology, wildlife biology, and landscape ecology. After receiving his undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences at U.C. Davis, Erik received his Ph.D. from the Program in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology at the University of Nevada, Reno.