I am a plant evolutionary ecologist and evolutionary geneticist. I'm motivated by understanding factors that influence the formation and maintenance of plant diversity. Most of my work has centered on understanding why adaptive divergence among populations only sometimes results in speciation, using the California serpentine flora as a model system. Recently, I have started building a genomics toolbox to investigate the factors that mediate outcomes of secondary contact.
I love botanizing for rare plants, getting deep into some data analysis, music and dance :)
Introgression is pervasive across the tree of life, but varies across taxa, geography, and genomic regions. However, the factors modulating this variation and how they may be affected by global change are not well-understood. Here, we used 200 genomes and a 15-year site-specific environmental dataset to investigate the effect of environmental variation and mating system divergence on the magnitude of introgression between a recently diverged outcrosser-selfer pair of annual plants in the genus Clarkia. These sister taxa diverged very recently and subsequently came into secondary sympatry where they form replicated contact zones. Consistent with observations of other outcrosser-selfer pairs, we found that introgression was asymmetric between taxa, with substantially more introgression from the selfer to the outcrosser. This asymmetry was caused by a bias in the direction of initial F1 hybrid formation and subsequent backcrossing. We also found extensive variation in the outcrosser’s admixture proportion among contact zones, which was predicted nearly entirely by interannual variance in spring precipitation. Greater fluctuations in spring precipitation resulted in higher admixture proportions, likely mediated by the effects of spring precipitation on the expression of traits that determine premating reproductive isolation. Climate-driven hybridization dynamics may be particularly affected by global change, potentially reshaping species boundaries and adaptation to novel environments.