Shane Campbell-Staton

Soon after Shane Campbell-Staton finished collecting genomic data about the green anole lizard in Texas and Oklahoma in summer 2013, a polar vortex swept through the region.

For Campbell-Staton, who studies genetic adaptation to climate change, this event provided an important opportunity to study rapid evolutionary response to natural selection. “After I returned there, I was able to show how southern populations of the green anole had begun expressing phenotypes normally associated with northern populations.” Unlike the timeframe we usually associate with evolution, these changes took place in a mere matter of months.

Campbell-Staton studies the way that natural selection works in both the short and the long term. “We can better inform conservation efforts by choosing to conserve populations that have a large amount of genetic variation in genes that are known to be important for particular traits associated with adaptability to different climates,” Campbell-Staton explains. “As our ability to model future climate change increases, and as our ability to understand how organisms are responding to that climate change increases, we can bring those two pieces together to help to inform conservation work.”

Given our ever more erratic climate, understanding its effect on function and survival may be the key to coping with increasing stress that climate change places on all species, from the green anole to Homo sapiens. As Campbell-Staton says, “It’s a race against the clock.”