EEB Thursday Seminar Series - Bur oak evolution and its impact on the forest

Seminar Summary - The bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa) is a foundation of eastern North American forests and savannas. It is massive, long-lived, strong, and enormously variable. But the bur oak is no lone wolf: it exchanges genes with other oak species from the Black Hills to Vermont, and from northern Minnesota to Texas. This talk will provide an overview of ongoing rangewide and reciprocal transplant studies of bur oaks undertaken as part of a collaborative NSF - NSFC Dimensions of Biodiversity project, “Consequences of diversity in Asian and American tree syngameons for functional variation, adaptation and symbiont biodiversity.” It will present analyses of genomic, trait, mycorrhizal, and gall wasp data to provide an integrative view of how bur oaks and their relatives shape the forest.