In Person/Virtual Lecture 11/29

A TWO-WAY STREET: ECO-EVOLUTIONARY DYNAMICS OF COMMON MILKWEED IN URBAN ENVIRONMENTS

Tuesday, November 29, 2:00PM EST

This talk will be held in person in the Ross Auditorium at the New York Botanical Garden. It will also be streamed on Zoom.

More Information and Register HERE

Urbanization poses one of the greatest threats to biodiversity on Earth and is altering the world’s landscapes at an unprecedented rate. While we have begun to grasp how urban conditions affect species’ population ecology and community structure, it remains unclear how city life influences species interactions as well as the evolution of urban populations. In this talk, Sophie Breitbart will discuss new findings about how urbanization shapes plant-pollinator interactions and evolution in common milkweed, a native plant of high conservation value.

Sophie Breitbart is an urban ecologist and evolutionary biologist investigating how urbanization influences the Monarch butterfly’s favorite botanical partner: common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca). After completing her B.A. in Biology at Wesleyan University in 2016, she worked as an environmental consultant assessing lake water quality and designing engineering plan sets for dam removals. She began her Ph.D. in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto in 2018. Her current research focuses on a garden she planted which contains 1,000 milkweed plants grown from seeds collected from urban, suburban, and rural areas.