Gavia Lertzman-Lepofsky

Biography

I am postdoc working with Mark Vellend (University of Sherbooke) and with LCAB. My research asks how environment, evolutionary history, and human impacts interact to shape community structure at large scales. I began this work during my undergraduate (Simon Fraser University), where I studied the effects of climate change on amphibians and genome size on life-history.

During my PhD, (University of Toronto), I studied Anolis community structure across elevation gradients and islands.

At LCAB, I am excited to learn from an interdisciplinary community and to be inspired by the creative questions and solutions that are leveraged to understand biodiversity in the Anthropocene.

Research

My work at LCAB will test and expand the concept of adaptive community dynamics - a framework proposed by Carroll et al. 2026 stating that community composition during human impacts will shift from species with traits that are poorly matched to the local environment to species that have a closer phenotypic match to the new environment. If this is true, this new community may have higher ecosystem function. My work will test this prediction and investigate whether the distribution and topography of traits in community trait space shift in predictable and non-random ways during community turnover. Understanding adaptive community dynamics work will inform management policies related to facilitation, acceptance, or resistance while also improving our ability to predict community response to disturbance.

Publication highlights 

Funder 

The Leverhulme Trust 
NSERC CPRA