THE
Olsen Lab
Research within the lab investigates how animals, particularly birds, adapt to a changing world. We are primarily concerned with the
two main drivers of a population's adaptive capacity, evolutionary change and ecological plasticity, and what degree of change, at what
rate, will cause a tipping point between local adaptation and the loss of population viability. Because of this, our research is
focused at the intersection of population and evolutionary ecology. The colonization of habitats that are "novel" on different time
scales (e.g. from recently urbanized settings to geologically-transient tidal marshes and marine islands) provide the processes and the
field laboratories to describe generalities across ecosystems. Birds serve as an ideal model system for these investigations because
of their high detectability, their behavioral complexity and plasticity, the relative ease with which we can estimate their fecundity, and
society's interest in their conservation.
