Iris Garthwaite, a former Master’s student and NSF GRFP recipient now at the USGS, dug into lab techniques and image analysis for quantifying leaf venation and stomatal traits for her recent paper in Ecology and Evolution: https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.70683. Along with two former undergraduates in our lab, Catherine Lepp and Zyled Rodriguez, she found clear consequences of these traits for tree growth at the hot edge of Fremont cottonwood’s range:
but also complex patterns of genotype-specific plasticity that are not easily explained by selection in more predictably variable environments:
Her research raises a lot of interesting questions about the consequences of past and future climate variability for evolutionary and ecological responses in riparian forest ecosystems already experiencing major declines!