Buckley Lab

Question

How does biology (morphology, physiology, and life history) determine an organism's response to environmental change?

Approaches

Mechanistic models of species' ranges in changing environments
Energetic and ecological constraints on abundance and diversity

Research Interests

The Buckley lab combines theory, field and lab collection of ecological and physiological data, and ecoinformatics to examine how biology (morphology, physiology, and life history) determines an organism's response to environmental change. While most research has concerned reptiles and amphibians, we hope to continually extend our taxonomic focus.

One focus is developing mechanistic models of species distributions that scale from individual foraging energetics to population and community dynamics. The models enable more robust predictions of species distributions in unsampled regions and in response to environmental change. The models have been developed and tested for Anolis lizards in the Caribbean and applied to predict current ranges for North American lizards and those following climate change. Ongoing research aims to extend the models across taxonomy and geography and to consider the range implications of geographic trait variation and evolution and biotic constraints. Field and lab work to document ecology and physiology is employed to parameterize and test the models.

Additional research uses ecoinformatic analyses to addresses energetic and ecological constraints on global patterns of vertebrate ectotherm abundance, richness, and species turnover. Comparing these constraints with those of vertebrate endotherms addresses the ecology of ectothermy.