Comparative phylogeography of arctic and alpine tundra plants: Arctic and alpine tundra ecosystems are extremely sensitive to climate change. Organisms that specialize in these habitats were strongly influenced by the climatic oscillations of the Quaternary. In collaboration with colleagues in the DeChaine Lab at Western Washington University, I am studying the relative genetic consequences of historical climatic oscillations for a suite of plants found in high-latitude tundra and low-latitude alpine environments. We are using a multi-locus, coalescent-based approach to test hypotheses regarding the ways in which these northern and southern communities may have responded to paleoenvironmental events. By comparing genealogies across multiple species of co-distributed plants, we will be able to reconstruct the history of tundra ecosystems at the community level. This promises to yield a powerful model for exploring the evolution and assembly of tundra communities, which will be increasingly important to understand as current climate warming increasingly threatens these fragile ecosystems.