Jason S. McLachlan
Associate Professor
574-631-1850
Email
Photo: Barbara Johnston
Welcome! Research in the McLachlan Lab focuses on the dynamics of plant populations faced with large scale environmental change. The abundance, distribution and, in many cases, survival of species in the next century will be shaped by an unprecedented combination of human land-use, climate change, and changing atmospheric chemistry. Anticipating these trends is difficult, but we can often gain insight by examining how populations have responded to similar environmental perturbations in the past. Evidence for past population shifts comes from the physical traces individuals leave behind (in paleoecological data such as fossil pollen in sediments and tree-rings) and from the genetic structures of modern and past populations. The McLachlan Lab gathers these fragmentary records of population change and links them to environmental and biological processes using statistical models. Explore our research, lab members, and publications pages to learn more about us and the work we do.
Congratulations to our lab!
- 2024-08-26: Congratulations to Nate Kroeze for the successful defense of his Master’s work on “Environmental and Genetic Influences on Species Composition and Belowground Biomass Dynamics in Coastal Marshes.”
- 2024-05-30: Congratulations to Megan Vahsen for winning the Ecological Society of America George Mercer Award for her “Rapid plant trait evolution can alter coastal wetland resilience to sea level rise,” publication in Science from Jan. 26, 2023. See the full description of the award here.
- 2023-09-11: Congratulations to Nate Kroeze who was awarded a 2023-2024 Graduate Justice Fellowship. The fellowship is designed to create an interdisciplinary community of graduate students committed to scholarship that engages questions of justice.
- 2023-07-18: Congratulations to Megan Vahsen and co-authors for the publication “Complex eco-evolutionary responses of a foundational coastal marsh plant to global change” just out in New Phytologist. https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.19117
- There was an associated commentary on Megan’s paper titled, “Seed resurrection study unearths evolution of phenotypic plasticity.” https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.19240
- See other lab successes HERE