Meeting Abstract
A little lizard can say a lot about the health of an environment. Disturbances in an animal’s environment, including anthropogenic change, can affect how it acquires and uses limited energy resources to respond to stress, reproduce, and fight disease. Urbanization is one of the major forms of anthropogenic disturbance facing wild populations today. To better understand how urban changes affect animals in nature, we are using a variety of methods to track, monitor, and experimentally manipulate a well-studied model organism, the side-blotched lizard. A synthesis of physiological, demographic, and genomic results will be presented from a combination of field and laboratory studies to test both individual and population-level responses to urbanization. We are working to answer these questions which will help provide a broader picture of how species respond and even adapt to environmental change.
