New paper in PNAS!

My colleagues Nick Polato (Cornell) and Brian Gill (Brown University) along with fantastic co-authors  have published a new study to explain why tropical mountains are more biodiverse than temperate ones. Our team of scientists studied the physiology, genetics, and genomics of aquatic insects in Andean and Rocky Mountain aquatic insects to test Janzen's 1967 hypothesis. We found that narrow thermal tolerance leads to reduced gene flow and therefore greater rates of speciation across elevation gradients in the tropics but not in temperate mountains. This study also highlights the importance of integrative and collaborative work to tackle the big questions of our time. University press articles about our study can be found here (CSU) and here (Cornell)