Caitlin MacKenzie: Plant Ecology and Climate Change in New England

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Ecology faculty candidate Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie will present her research to the Bennington community during Science Workshop.

The northeast’s plant communities — and the conservation managers charged with protecting them — face daunting challenges in global climate change. Conservation practitioners depend on accurate and robust climate change vulnerability assessments to deploy their limited resources effectively. The mountain habitats in New England present a paradox in climate change vulnerability: competing hypotheses suggest that mountain plant communities could be either very vulnerable to climate change or situated in refugia that buffer them from climate change. Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie presents research testing these hypotheses and tracking plant responses to environmental change in New England. In the short term (season to season), plants may respond to variation in climate by shifting the timing of their leaf out and flowering. Historical records (decades to centuries) expand our understanding of the long-term trends in leaf out and flowering shifts and add context to the community- and ecosystem-level consequences of changing leaf out and flowering times. Over these decade-to-century time scales, environmental change can cause species declines or local extinctions that are recorded in herbaria and published floras. At a much longer time scale (millenia), changes in community composition can be detected in pollen and macrofossils preserved in lake sediments. These perspectives on floristic change at different time scales point to mountain refugia where cold-adapted plant taxa have persisted throughout the Holocene and recent climate change. Collaborations with Acadia National Park and Baxter State Park knit together these ecology and paleoecology approaches to better understand plant responses to climate change across time scales in New England

Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie is a plant ecologist with roots in conservation. Her research seeks to understand and predict the ecological impacts of climate change on plant communities. She worked in the mountains of New England as a backcountry environmental educator and researcher before completing the UVM Field Naturalist master’s program, followed by a PhD in Biology at Boston University, and a David H. Smith Conservation Research fellowship at UMaine’s Climate Change Institute. Caitlin taught Intro to Ecology, Forest Ecology, Conservation Paleoecology, and a Knitting/Winter Ecology short course as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Colby College. She is currently a Second Century Stewardship Fellow with active research weaving together paleoecology and climate change vulnerability assessments in Acadia National Park.