Welcome to the Funk Lab We strive to understand the evolutionary and ecological mechanisms that generate and maintain biological diversity using population genomics, experimental manipulations, and field studies. Our goal is to not only test basic evolutionary and ecological theory, but also directly inform policy and management decisions that will ultimately determine the fate of biodiversity.
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Alisha learning to conduct metabolic rate experiments in her first week of grad school
Congratulations to Dr. Alisha Shah–Ghalambor and Funk lab alumna–for the acceptance of her paper in Global Change Biology! Alisha and team tested the climate variability hypothesis by comparing standard metabolic rates in baetid mayflies and perlid stoneflies across […]
Camera trap photo of mountain lion in the Colorado Front Range (Photo: Jesse Lewis)
Large apex predators are sensitive to urbanization because of their dependence on extensive contiguous habitats to support their large home rages and an abundant prey base. In a paper recently published in Molecular Ecology, postdoc Daryl Trumbo and […]
EvoTRAC field crew during stream “bioblitz” of the remote Oyacachi basin, Ecuador, way back in 2012.
Tropical mountains are the most biodiverse terrestrial ecosystems of the world, but the causes of this exceptional species richness have eluded biologists for centuries. In 1967, Dan Janzen postulated that reduced temperature seasonality in the tropics […]
Boreal toad (Anaxyrus boreas). Photo credit: Wendy Lanier and Brittany Mosher
Harry Crockett (Colorado Parks and Wildlife [CPW]), Larissa Bailey (CSU Dept. of Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology), and Chris received a grant from CPW to study the conservation genomics of the Southern Rocky Mountain (SRM) boreal toad (Anaxyrus boreas) group, which […]
N. LeRoy Poff and collaborators (including Patricia Salerno and W. Chris Funk from the Funk Lab) recently had a paper accepted in Ecology Letters on the effects of an extreme flood event on stream insect persistence and evolution. They found that persistence decreased with increasing disturbance and that species traits predicted resilience. For taxa […]
Alisha presented her DDIG work that addresses why mayfly species ranges are more restricted than we would predict based on thermal breadth alone. Alisha and her colleagues hypothesized that temperature acts synergistically with species interactions, such as predation, to restrict mayfly range expansion. They predicted that as mayflies move to warmer or cooler streams, […]
Citation: Shah A, Gill B, Encalada A, Flecker A, Funk WC, Guayasamin JM, Kondratieff B, Poff N, Thomas S, Zamudio KR, Ghalambor CK (2017) Climate variability predicts thermal limits of aquatic insects across elevation and latitude. Functional Ecology 31, 2118-2127. […]
Functional Ecology recently accepted a paper by Alisha Shah and other EVOTRAC coauthors and featured it. As predicted by theory, Alisha and her coauthors found that tropical aquatic insects have narrower thermal breadths than their temperate counterparts. Their findings also suggest that lowland tropical insects may be the most vulnerable to climate change compared […]
Congratulations to undergrad Eva Bacmeister for winning 1st place for her talk at the 2017 Front Range Student Ecology Symposium held at CSU! Eva’s talk was based on her independent study of how temperature variability shapes the evolution of swimming performance (an important thermal tolerance trait) in temperate and tropical aquatic insects. Her work […]
For her PhD work, Alisha has explored the effect of temperature in setting the range limits of temperate and tropical aquatic insects. So far, she has found that temperate insects that experience wide seasonal fluctuations in temperature typically have broader thermal breadths and can remain active over a wider range of temperatures. On the […]
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Contact Department of Biology
Colorado State University
1878 Campus Delivery
Fort Collins, CO 80523-1878
Tel: 970-491-3289
E-mail: Chris.Funk@colostate.edu
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