Juliet studies how climate change alters plant phenology in the grasslands and sandhills of Santa Cruz County.  Using naturalist Randall Morgan’s collection of plant phenology field notes, courtesy of the UCSC Museum of Natural History, she is resurveying some of the sites that he studied in the 1990s.  This results in a community-wide  plant phenology dataset of 20+ years!  By comparing phenological shifts to changes in climate over time, she can determine if there is a correlation between climate change and shifts in plant phenology.  Later, she will conduct a greenhouse experiment which will simulate climate change vs non climate change conditions to identify which mechanisms drive the phenological responses she observes in the field. Specifically, she will analyze which plant traits (annual/perennial, woody/herb, tap root/shallow roots, etc) are associated with specific phenological responses to climate change.

Angie works with a large collection of pollinator species (mostly bees and wasps) that were collected by naturalist Randall Morgan in the 1990’s. Using the information about the plants that were being pollinated by these insects at the time of collection, she is creating pollination networks for various habitat types surrounding the Santa Cruz area. She will resurvey the same sites to determine if and how these networks may have changed over time. Later, she will conduct greenhouse experiments to test how decrease resources effect nectar quality, pollination rates and seed output.