Travel grants enable Yao Liu, a Botany student, to travel to University of Wisconsin – Madison to conduct Quaternary research

Yao Liu, PhD student in Botany & the Program in Ecology, in Professor Steve Jackson’s lab, is expanding the search for past novel and disappearing climate states globally and into the deeper past. Climate change can trigger the reshuffling of species into communities with no modern analog. Current work has linked no-analog communities and climates at continental scales.

Yao is assessing the emergence of no-analog communities during warmer-than-present time periods, such as the last-interglacial (the Eemian, ~ 120,000 years ago), to evaluate how no-analog climates and high climate velocities are related to community shuffling.

Areas in red indicate end-21st-century climates with no close analog
in late 20th-century climates. From Williams et al. 2007

Yao Liu received support from the Botany Northen Fellowship and the Shlemon Center Student Travel Grant for traveling to University of Wisconsin – Madison in November 2013. There she collaborated with Dr. John W. (Jack) Williams, who is conducting foundational, high profile research aimed at understanding the relationship between novel climates and no-analog communities.