Lunch with a Scientist is an ongoing monthly lecture series at Cedar Creek. Each month, scientists present a general-audience lecture about their work at or related to Cedar Creek and take questions from the audience.
The series has been running since January 2019 as an in-person program. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, it was shifted online in April 2020, from which point recordings are available. Programs take place on the second Tuesday of each month (11:30am central time), either in-person at Cedar Creek, via zoom, or both. Details about speakers and delivery mode are at https://cbs.umn.edu/cedarcreek/public-programs/lunch-scientist
Climate change threatens trees because their migration rate does not match the rate of warming. Assisted migration is a proposed solution to help trees migrate at the rate needed to keep pace with climate change. We use bur oak as a model to examine the performance of populations from across the species’ range in various climates. Our results can be informative for seed sourcing to promote climate-adapted bur oak populations in the Midwest.
About the Researcher
Dr. Lucy Rea is a scientist with an interest in climate adaptation and resilience in Midwest ecosystems. She did her undergraduate work in Plant Biology at Michigan State and minored in Science Environmental and Technology Public Policy and Environmental Sustainability Studies. After undergrad, she interned as a seed collector for the Bureau of Land Management in Carlsbad, NM. She worked with Dr. Jeannine Cavender-Bares at the University of Minnesota for a Ph.D. in Plant and Microbial Biology, which she defended in May 2024. Her dissertation focused on how populations of bur oak responded to different climates, with the goal of informing land managers on potential seed sources for adapting northern forests to climate change. Her Ph.D. provided her experience in plant ecophysiology, plant community ecology, plant quantitative genetics, and spectral biology. Dr. Rea is continuing her work with the Cavender-Bares lab as a postdoc working with the National Parks Service to write protocols for oak wilt detection in parks using methodology developed by members of the lab.