Friday, February 28, 2020 - 11:00

Fri, February 28, 2020 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM AQUATIC ECOSYSTEMS RESEARCH LABORATORY (AERL). IOF Seminar Series

Speaker: Dr. Jennifer Sunday
Assistant Professor,
McGill University

As the world has warmed, species distributions have moved polewards in latitude, upwards in elevation and deeper in depth. This global redistribution calls on ecologists to apply long-standing hypotheses about the factors that limit species distributions. Here I present macrophysiological analyses showing how marine and terrestrial ectotherms differ in the extent to which they are physiologically limited within their distributional ranges. I use contemporary records of range shifts to further elucidate the relative roles of species traits and ecological interactions in mediating range shifts in a warming world. I then present work aimed at connecting physiological responses in simple experimental environments to population responses in variable and competitive environments, and share ongoing work aimed at tracking high-resolution range shifts in real-time.

Jennifer Sunday is an Assistant Professor at McGill University, specializing in marine ecosystem responses to climate change through species’ range shifts, changing ecological interactions, and adaptation. Dr. Sunday currently holds a William Dawson Scholar Chair at McGill University, and a Sloan Fellowship in Ocean Sciences. Her work has contributed novel advances in understanding how physiological variables relate to species’ ranges and their climate vulnerabilities, and how climate change responses occur in the context of community interactions and temporally varying environments. In addition, Dr. Sunday is an affiliate of the Hakai Institute, where she is exploring the use of eDNA for tracking marine biodiversity responses to global change.

Location: AERL Theatre