Topher Weiss-Lehman

Range expansions are crucibles for rapid evolution, acting via both selective and neutral mechanisms. While selection on traits such as dispersal and fecundity may increase expansion speed, neutral mechanisms arising from repeated bottlenecks and genetic drift in edge populations (i.e. gene surfing) could slow spread or make it less predictable...

Recently I was lucky enough to present a poster at the Ecological Society of America (ESA) conference in Portland, Oregon. This is the largest conference of ecologists and evolutionary biologists in the US with over 4,000 attendees this year. With so many researchers attending a single conference, the diversity of...