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From Computer Simulations to Channel Island Foxes: Life in the Face of Environmental Change
Summary
This research studied how animals survive when their environment changes quickly, including looking at how tiny plastic particles (microplastics) affect endangered foxes on California's Channel Islands. The scientists found that genetic diversity helps animal populations survive environmental disasters and that microplastics pose a new threat to wildlife health. Since humans are also exposed to microplastics through food and water, understanding their effects on mammals like foxes could help us learn about potential risks to our own health.
Global climate change is impacting biodiversity and has forced populations to adapt, invade new habitats, or face extinction. Assessing the impacts of environmental change and novel threats to biodiversity represents a central challenge for contemporary science. By utilizing a combination of computational biology, environmental toxicology, and museum research techniques, I investigated how populations respond to sudden environmental shifts and evaluated novel environmental threats to vulnerable populations. In my first chapter, I investigated how the spatial storage effect leads to evolutionary rescue and long-term persistence in populations experiencing rapid and continuous environmental shifts. My second chapter deals with another response to environmental shifts – invasion. Specifically, I show that balancing selection in an ancestral population affects establishment in novel habitats when founder populations are small. Finally, my third study evaluates how the novel environmental threat of microplastics/nanoplastics impacts a mammal of conservation concern, the San Nicolas Island Fox (Urocyon littoralis dickeyi).