Author: Ian Wang

We have a new postdoc this week – Matt McElroy has started a postdoc in the lab.  Matt worked with Adam Leache at the University of Washington for his Ph.D. and received an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in museum collections research to come to Berkeley.

Mike Yuan gave a great talk on Comparative Claw Morphology Across Anolis Lizards at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) meeting last week.  He examined over 500 specimens from 55 species, including all six ecomorphs, and a write-up of his talk is now available on the Anole Annals blog.

Guin and Ian have a new review paper out in Ecography on how and when to use space-for-time substitution to study microevolutionary processes at fine spatial and temporal scales.

Wogan G.O.U. and Wang I.J. (2018) The value of space-for-time substitution for studying fine-scale microevolutionary processes. Ecography.

Ian has a new paper out in Molecular Ecology, in collaboration with Sydney Glassman and Tom Bruns, on the factors driving community assembly in soil fungi at fine spatial scales.  Using generalized dissimilarity modeling, this study shows that environmental filtering, rather than dispersal limitation, explains variation in fungal communities.  The data were collected from the Gaylor Lakes basin in Yosemite National Park.

Glassman S.I., Wang I.J., and Bruns T.D. (2017) Environmental filtering by pH and soil nutrients drives community assembly in fungi at fine spatial scales. Molecular Ecology, 26: 6960-6973.

Xu B., Sun G., Wang X., Lu J., Wang I.J.*, Wang Z.* (2017) Population genetic structure is shaped by historical, geographic, and environmental factors in the leguminous shrub Caragana microphylla on the Inner Mongolia Plateau of China. BMC Plant Biology, 17: 200. doi: 10.1186/s12870-017-1147-7 [* Indicates co-senior authorship.]

In collaboration with Jake Brenner (Ithaca College) and Van Butsic (UC Berkeley), Ian Wang has published a new paper in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment on the effects of cannabis grows on forest fragmentation in Northern California.  The paper quantifies the landscape impacts of expanding cannabis production and puts forward a new approach for analyzing the per-unit-area effects of emerging agricultural land-uses.  The study has already garnered a lot of attention in mainstream media, including Anthropocene Magazine and Vice.

Wang I.J., Brenner J.C., and Butsic V. (2017) An emerging agricultural crop leads to deforestation and fragmentation. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 15: 495-501. [pdf]

In collaboration with a great group of landscape geneticists, Ian has written a new book chapter on landscape genomics that will appear in the upcoming Population Genomics textbook.

Balkenhol N., Dudaniec R.Y., Krutovsky K.V., Johnson J.S., Cairns D.M., Segelbacher G., Selkoe K., von der Heyden S., Wang I.J., Selmoni O., and Joost S. (2017) Landscape genomics: understanding relationships between environmental heterogeneity and genomic characteristics of populations. in Rajora O.P. (Ed.) Population Genomics (pp.XX-XX). New York: Springer.

Allozymes once ruled the day but have now been all but replaced by modern genotypic markers. However, many collections of allozyme homegenates still exist, and for some species, particularly those of conservation concern, these collections may be the only sources of historical genetic material. Sequencing from allozyme homogenates has often come up short, but Mike Yuan has figured out a simple way to significantly improve sequencing success: just add some trehalose to your PCR reactions. His method is described in Conservation Genetics Resources.

Yuan M.L., Wogan G.O.U., and Wang I.J. (2017) Improved PCR amplification of vertebrate nuclear DNA from historical allozyme homogenates. Conservation Genetics Resources. doi: 10.1007/s12686-017-0811-4

Ian Wang and Brad Shaffer published a new paper on the compatibility of field ecological and population genetic estimates of dispersal and population size in pond breeding salamanders. The paper is now available in Evolutionary Applications.

Wang I.J. and Shaffer H.B. (2017) Population genetic and field-ecological analyses return similar estimates of dispersal over space and time in an endangered amphibian. Evolutionary Applications, 10: 630-639.

Mike Yuan just received a Grant-in-Herpetology from the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles for his project on the evolution of Anolis lizards.