A Boost for Red Spruce: Helping a Keystone Species Adapt to Climate Change
By looking at spruce growth in research gardens and spruce genes in the lab, the project is investigating how P. rubens declined in abundance and shifted its range in response to climate change during the last 20,000 years, and how we might expect those shifts to continue in the future. The shifts occur in tandem with local adaptation, the Keller lab’s main area of research: the process by which populations within a species vary genetically and evolve over generations in response to their local conditions, be that on a regional scale or the bottom versus the top of the same mountain.