Institute at Brown for Environment and Society

A major goal of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology is to understand the processes that generate patterns in diversity across levels of biological organization, from molecules to ecosystems. I use remote sensing and population genomics to study Neotropical rainforest canopy tree species in the Bignoniaceae family that have a convenient characteristic of producing floral displays so vibrant as to be detectable in high-resolution satellite imagery. I test hypotheses explaining the geographic distributions of organisms and traits in wide-ranging natural populations across variable landscapes, as a piece of the puzzle that is how tropical forests will respond to a changing world.