Margaret E. K. Evans

I am a plant population biologist with research focused in two areas: conservation ecology, including the development of general tools for population and range modeling, as well as building knowledge about particular rare species, and evolutionary ecology, including bet hedging, life history evolution, breeding system evolution, and comparative analyses of the evolution of climatic niches. Thus my research encompasses plant ecology, evolution, and conservation. I use a variety of tools – from demography and reproductive biology in natural and experimental settings to phylogenies and trait evolution, from species distribution modeling to population viability analysis – in order to study plant diversity, its origins, dynamics, and conservation. Since joining the tree-ring lab at the UofA in September of 2013, my research efforts are focused on building demographic models to forecast the geographic distributions of trees in western North America, particularly with respect to climate change. This involves the integration of large datasets using multilevel statistical models, in order to estimate climatic and competitive niche parameters. In addition to my education in Biology at Reed College (B. A.) and in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona (Ph. D.), I have worked as a field ecologist for The Nature Conservancy, the U. S. D. A. Forest Service, and a private, non-profit biological research station (Archbold Biological Station). I have held post-doctoral fellowships at Yale University’s Institute for Biospheric Studies (YIBS), at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, France, and at one of the world's largest natural history museums, the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, France.

Degrees

• BA Biology, Reed College 1993
• PhD Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, The University of Arizona, 2003