February 23-27, 2011
at the University of Oklahoma

Recent reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggest that anthropogenic warming of 5.8C can be expected to occur over the next 100 years. Species can respond to such change by adapting in situ, migrating to more favorable habitats or becoming locally extirpated. Considerable field, laboratory and theoretical efforts have gone into predicting which responses of organisms are more likely, and what characteristics predispose organisms to particular types of elucidated responses. Climate shifts are not new to the Earth system, however, and increasingly, scientists are turning to the geological record of the late Quaternary (the past 25,000 years). In this seminar, we will explore various types of paleorecords to see what they reveal about the past adaptation, extinction and migration patterns of animals and plants. By investigating how organisms responded to the sometimes very rapid climatic shifts of the past, we gain important insights into how contemporary organisms are likely to respond to ongoing anthropogenic changes.

The class Reading List To be announced (These books and articles supplied by OSLEP)

Felisa Smith is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of New Mexico. Her research interests are Paleoecology; Ecological and evolutionary effects of past and present climate change on mammals; Macroecological patterns of body size across spatial, temporal and taxonomic scales; historical role of women in science. Dr. Smith received her Ph.D. from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California at Irvine in 1991. Dr. Smith is a member of the Science Advisory Board, National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS). She is associate Editor of Paleobiology and subject Editor of Ecology.
Dr. Smith is Director of the Program in Interdisciplinary Biological & Biomedical Science (PiBBs), an integrative graduate student training program involving Biology, Anthropology, Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, and Mathematics and Statistics Departments at UNM, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Santa Fe Institute which is funded by Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the National Institutes of Health.
She is the recipient of grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Interdisciplinary Biomedical Sciences PiBBs, and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) and the author of numerous publications