An expert Green Talk from Dr Yang Liu, followed by an audience Q&A and discussion.
This event has concluded, watch the recording here.
Overview
Anthropogenic climate change is causing widespread maladaptation in natural ecosystems and poses a potent threat to global biodiversity. By estimation, the geographic distributions of about 50% of plant and animal species have shrunken.
As genetic diversity within species is progressively being lost before species go extinct, there must be many species that are becoming genetically depauperate, leading to the global gene pool decaying faster than the loss of species. Hence, assessing putative genetic maladaptation of populations to climate change provides an avenue for foreseeing organisms in jeopardy under climate change. We eventually hope to use this prognostication to inform conservation and restoration.
This talk is focussed on two key areas of research based on space-for-time analysis including (1) how can we forecast genomic vulnerability under future climatic scenarios; and (2) how are the adaptability and evolvability of phenotypes altering in a changing climate? Forest trees are used as a study system for demonstration in the talk.
Speaker
Dr Yang Liu is an evolutionary geneticist, currently working at Cambridge as a Research Associate. He is broadly interested in the eco-evolutionary dynamics of plant populations that have undergone environmental heterogeneity over spatiotemporal scales.
His research aims to provide a holistic understanding of major episodes in plant demographic and life histories, inform conservation interventions, and foster sustainability. He tackles research questions at the interface between ecology and evolutionary biology with the integration of genetics and genomics to elucidate: (1) signal transduction in the course of matter and energy fluxes from the environment to functional traits further cascading to ecosystem functioning & biodiversity, and (2) the causes and consequences of such dynamic changes through the lens of evolution.
This is a virtual event held as a Zoom webinar. Please register to attend.
This Green Talk is co-organised by the Interdisciplinary Research Hub on Sustainability & Conservation and the Science Society.
Part of the Inter-College Cambridge Green Week 17-23 Oct 2022.
