Haines Family Assistant Professor Was a postdoctoral researcher in the Environmental Studies program at the University of Colorado Boulder and received her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her research explores the ecology and evolution of wild plant populations, with an emphasis on responses to climate change. She published as Megan Peterson until 2021. Research Research Interests: Wild populations are experiencing rapid environmental change, creating both urgent conservation needs and also fascinating natural experiments. My research explores how plant populations cope with environmental change over space and time, and what this means for patterns of fitness, population persistence, and geographic distributions. I’m particularly interested in the mechanisms that generate stability vs. tipping points in species’ responses to environmental change, and how we can scale local population processes, such as local adaptation, to the kinds of landscape- and species-level predictions that are most relevant to conservation. To tackle these questions, I use a wide range of field and greenhouse experiments, long-term datasets, and population models, and work in a variety of plant systems, from common alpine species to rare endemics. Selected Publications Selected Publications: Google Scholar Research Gate 2023 Plant Biology Undergraduate Research Symposium Tuesday, December 5, 2023 - 10:55am On Monday, December 4th, the University of Georgia Plant Biology Department hosted its annual Undergraduate Research Symposium. This symposium highlighted the achievements of our undergraduate Plant Biology students who have either completed or… Megan DeMarche featured in "In Defense of Plants" podcast Friday, June 2, 2023 - 12:20pm Megan DeMarche, Haines Family Assistant Professor in Plant Biology, was featured in Episode 417 of the acclaimed podcast "In Defense of Plants" by internationally-recognized blogger and podcaster Matt Candeias:
