Research foci: How physiological and/or behavioral traits such as behavioral thermoregulation in organisms affect current rates of population extinction and how these patterns are related to rates of future climate-forced extinctions (e.g. lizards: Sinervo et al. 2010).

Typical project: For a chosen lizard species, estimate patterns of behavioral thermoregulation in nature and the lab; assemble location data of populations across the species’ range (museum records); develop a physiological model that predicts current distributional limits of a species and extend the model to predict future distributions, give scenarios for rates of climate warming; and in wks 5-6, resurvey sites for extinction status and deploy dataloggers to collect data on temperature (Dzialowski, 2005, Sinervo et al., 2010, 2011) to determine if sites are now too hot to sustain that species of lizard, given patterns of behavioral thermoregulation.

Contact Information:

Email: sinervo@ucsc.edu

Website: Sinervo Research Lab