Lab News

Mike Yuan has  been awarded a Grant in Aid of Research from the Berkeley chapter of Sigma Xi. Mike’s award will support his work on parallel evolution and convergence in Anolis lizards.

Mike Yuan has received a $2,000 Student Research Award from the American Society of Naturalists for his work on parallel evolution in Anolis lizards.

Mike Yuan has received a prestigious Graduate Student Research Fellowship from the Smithsonian Institution! The award will fund him to work at the National Museum of Natural History with Rayna Bell and Kevin de Queiroz for one year.

We have a new paper on alkaloid resistance genes in poison frogs published in PLOS One.  Motivated by the idea that if resistance is costly to maintain then we could expect it to be lost in low toxicity populations, we examined individual variation in a major alkaloid resistance gene in three species of poison frogs (Dendrobates auratus, D. granuliferus, and D. pumilio).

Yuan M.L. and Wang I.J. (2018) Sodium ion channel alkaloid resistance does not vary with toxicity in aposematic Dendrobates poison frogs: an examination of correlated trait evolution. PLOS One, 13: e0194265. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0194265

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]