Current Students

Sara Dart, PhD student
Three-time winner of the annual Pismo Beach “Queen of the Dunes”, Sara Dart is one of the few living humans that speaks fluent Camissoniopsis. Sara’s research focusses on mating system evolution, specifically the evolution of selfing in the mighty dune endemic Camissoniopsis cheiranthifolia. Through large-scale geographic surveys of floral morphology, glasshouse experiments and mating system estimation using genetic markers or her own design, Dart has shown evolutionary differentiation from outcrossing to multiple stable mixed mating systems in this species. She has gone on to testing theoretical predictions concerning how the evolution of the mating system influences and is influenced by inbreeding depression, pollination ecology and floral herbivory. In addition to her botanical work, Dart has studied the dynamics of near-shore costal water movement under the tutelage of Professor Dave Hubbard at the famous Coal Oil Point Institute. Favouring an 8-foot funshape, she has provided new evidence for the positive effect of neoprene and salt water on research productivity.

Adriana Lopez Villalobos, PhD student
Adriana hails from Mexico City, where she completed a BSC and MSc at UNAM. Making her way north, she turned her attention from pollination ecology to the ecology and evolution of range limits, with a particular interest in the extent to which variation in demography across species’ ranges influences population genetic structure and, in turn, the adaptive potential of populations across the range. Her project involves very large-scale surveys of demographic variables and genetic structure in the Pacific coastal dune endemic Camissoniopsis cheiranthifolia. By surveying a very high proportion of extant populations distributed along the near 1-dimensional geographic range of this species, Adriana is applying population and landscape-genetic analyses to test theoretical predictions concerning how demography and geographic location combine to determine the genetic diversity within populations and the degree of differentiation and gene flow between them. Adriana is also using population-genetic and phylogeographic analyses to shed light on the evolutionary history of mating system differentiation in C. cheiranthifolia. This species exhibits the full range of mating systems: from strict self-incompatibility associated with large flowers and complete outcrossing, to fully self-compatible, cleistogamous flowers and obligate self-fertilization. Adriana’s preliminary results suggests multiple independent origins of self-fertilization within this single species as well as hybridization associated with the maintenance of self-incompatibility.

Anna Hargreaves, PhD student (Anna’s website)
Anna did her BSc at Trent University, where she first became interested in the fascinating world of plant-animal interactions.  A 15-month exchange to South Africa sparked a fruitful relationship with Steven Johnson and the beginning of her work on pollination in South Africa.  Her honours thesis on bird pollination of Protea roupelliae was co-supervised by Erica Nol, whose influence sparked a second long-standing interest in arctic-breeding birds.  After time “off” working in the arctic,  Costa Rica and New Zealand, Anna started her MSc at the University of Calgary with Lawrence Harder (again co-supervised by Steve Johnson).  Her MSc research explored the evolutionary and ecological consequences of pollen theft, using the florally-diverse genus Aloe, in South Africa, as a study system.  Between graduate degrees Anna worked at the Centre for Conservation Research at the Calgary Zoo, where she reunited with the shorebirds of the Canadian arctic and conducted both research and outreach on a variety of threatened taxa, especially amphibians.  Finally, all this culminated in the beginning of her PhD here, in the Eckert lab, in January 2010.  Her PhD has focussed on the importance of abiotic factors and biotic interactions in determining the altitudinal range limits of plants growing the Rocky Mountains of Canada. Working out of the University of Calgary Biogeochemical Institute field station in the Kananaskis Valley, Anna has performed massive reciprocal transplant experiments with the diminutive annual hemiparasite Rhinanthus minor (Orobanchaceae) to determine the ecological and evolutionary limits to elevation distribution.

Stephanie Greer, MSc student
Stephanie hails from McMaster University where she studied mostly genetics and molecular biology. For her MSc project, she is assembling and comparing the transcriptomes of outcrossing versus self-fertilizing populations of the Pacific coastal dune endemic Abronia umbellata.

Lindsey Falk, BSc student
The role of biotic interactions in causing the limits to species distributions is poorly understood, so Lindsey (fueled by an NSERC Undergraduate Summer Research Award) teamed up with Anna Hargreaves and headed to the Rocky Mountains in the Kananaskis Valley. There she performed a factorial experiment manipulating herbivory on das wünderplant Rhinanthus minor to directly test the role of herbivory limiting fitness across the species altitudinal range. Lindsey is also reputed to enjoy country music, an admirable quality in a young person.

John Viengkone, BSc student

Habitat restoration is becoming an increasingly necessary conservation strategy in a world increasingly impacted by human habitat destruction and fragmentation. Such is the case on the lovely Pacific coastal dunes of western North America. John is addressing the question of whether it is best to revegetate dunes with stock derived from nearby populations. Working with the dune endemic Camissoniopsis cheiranthifolia, and using a combination of geographic analysis of variation in floral morphology and microsatellite polymorphisms, he is determining whether restored populations are derived from local sources or an admixture of local and nonlocal genotypes. He is then quantifying reproductive variation to see whether the use of non local sources reduces the fitness of restored populations.