Joaquin Nunez
University of Vermont, VT·Ecology & Evolution
Winters in North America are warming about twice as fast as summers, yet most climate change biology has focused on coping with extreme heat. This gap matters because cold winters often set the northern limit of where a species can live.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Genetics
Plant Science & Agriculture
- Topics
Drosophila suzukii
spotted wing Drosophila
invasive species
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Nov 2028
What they work on
- Quantify genetic variation in cold tolerance, overwintering survival, and post-winter reproduction in Drosophila suzukii from Vermont and Kentucky, and measure how these traits shift between summer and winter morphs.
- Use whole-genome resequencing of fly populations to determine whether D. suzukii maintains persistent overwintering populations and how much its genetic structure is shaped by seasonal adaptive tracking.
- Build simulations of a metapopulation facing fluctuating stressors to explore how plasticity, local adaptation, and adaptive tracking evolve together.
- Incorporate climate change projections into these simulations to predict how reaction norms for overwintering traits will evolve as winters warm.
More about the research
The spotted wing Drosophila (Drosophila suzukii) is a good test case. This fruit fly came from southeast Asia, reached California in 2008, and has since spread to 48 US states and across Europe. It is also a major crop pest, causing up to $500 million in losses each year in the US. The fly can develop into a summer-specialized form or a winter-specialized form, called 'morphs.' These forms help it survive as an invader. In this collaborative project, the team asks how the fly's overwintering traits are shaped by three forces, and how they may evolve as winters weaken. The first is plasticity, meaning a single genotype changing its body in response to the environment. The second is local adaptation, meaning genetic differences between places. The third is seasonal adaptive tracking, meaning populations evolving rapidly across the seasons.
Why it matters
Spotted wing Drosophila damages soft fruit crops and causes up to $500 million in US losses each year. Knowing whether milder winters will let it persist and spread farther north could help fruit growers and pest managers in northern regions anticipate and prepare for outbreaks. More broadly, the work could improve predictions of which species gain ground as winters warm.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Kathleen Lotterhos
Northeastern University, MA·Ecology & Evolution·Early-career
Quantify genetic variation in cold tolerance, overwintering survival and post-winter reproduction, and the reaction norms of these traits in summer and winter morphs, using Drosophila suzukii flies from Vermont and Kentucky.
Jesse Lasky
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Plant Science & Agriculture
Profile the diversity of trans-species microRNAs, small RNAs that dodder sends into host plants, across Cuscuta populations, and identify their host mRNA targets using small RNA sequencing and host transcriptome assemblies.
Carly Kenkel
University of Southern California, CA·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether differences in staghorn coral shape plasticity are driven by changes in calcification and fine-scale skeletal deposition, using a lab water-flow experiment on clonal replicates of Acropora cervicornis genotypes.
The school
University of Vermont: 16 labs on PI Pages, $246M a year on research, 76 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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