Welcome

The Frishkoff Lab seeks to understand how human impacts on the environment are recasting ecological and evolutionary patterns forged over millennia.

Our core research foci include:

(1) elucidating why some species prosper while others fail when confronted with anthropogenic change through biogeographic, eco-physiological, and community approaches,

(2) determining how human impacts are pruning the phylogenetic tree of life, and whether past macro-evolutionary trajectories inform current and future tolerance to anthropogenic change,

(3) developing statistical methods that account for omnipresent biases in observational data, to better test eco-evolutionary hypotheses.

We focus primarily on Reptiles and Amphibians in The Caribbean, South America and Texas.

Updates

Outreach

Luke and Dan head off to Cleveland OH to attend Evolution 2022.

Luke will be talking about: “Evolutionary Opportunity and the Limits of Community Similarity in Replicate Radiations of Island Lizards” Dan will be presenting work from his PhD entitled: “Climate anomalies and competition reduce establishment success during biological invasion”

Fieldwork

Puerto Rico 2021

Our fieldwork in Puerto Rico was incredibly successful. We saw every species of anole on the island, ran tons of field surveys to estimate lizard abundance, and collected a ton of lizard poop samples to determine what they were eating.

New Publication

Congrats to Alex Murray – the first chapter of his dissertation was published at Global Ecology and Biogeography!

Traits do predict species sensitivity to habitat modification, but a one size fits all relationship falls down on the job. Instead the trait-sensitivity relationship changes depending on what climate zone habitat modification occurs in, offering a potential reason for past inconsistencies in studies of trait effects. Find the Paper here: https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.13237