Dr Callum Lawson

My research seeks to understand and predict how environmental fluctuations affect ecological and evolutionary processes. In particular, I’m interested in how short-term fluctuations in climate, such as year-to-year variation in temperature, affect species’ responses to climate change. My research has looked at the impacts of such fluctuations on: (i) range expansions under climate change, using the silver-spotted skipper Hesperia comma (as a PhD student with Robert Wilson), (ii) long-term population growth rates, in a wide range of taxa (as a post-doc with Martijn van de Pol), and (iii) the evolution of bet-hedging adaptations, with a focus on seed dormancy in desert annuals (an ongoing collaboration with Jennifer Gremer and Larry Venable). In my current project at iDiv, I’m working with Uli Brose, Diana Bowler, and Katrin Böhning-Gaese to examine population stability under environmental fluctuations. We’re using empirical datasets of population dynamics from a variety of taxa to investigate which kinds of species are most resistant to such fluctuations, in the sense of showing little change in population size during climatically-extreme periods, and which species are most resilient, in the sense of being able to quickly “bounce back” to their former population size afterwards.

2017-: Catalyst postdoc, iDiv Leipzig, Germany

2013-2016: Postdoc, Netherlands Institute of Ecology

2009-2013: PhD Biological Sciences, University of Exeter, UK

2006-2009: BA Biological Sciences, University of Oxford, UK

For an up-to-date list of my publications, see my Google Scholar profile.