A group of graduate students and post-docs led by René Clark were awarded $10,000 from the Research Coordinated Network for Evolution in Changing Seas (RCN-ECS) to start a new working group reviewing the literature on genomic analysis of past and present specimens to quantify evolution through time. The group includes members from five universities: Rutgers (René Clark, Katrina Catalano, Brendan Reid, Kyra Fitz, Malin Pinsky), Alabama (Anthony Snead), Old Dominion (Eric Garcia, John Whalen), Michigan State (Kyle Jaynes), and UC Santa Cruz (Allyson Salazar Sawkins).
The group will review the literature to understand and synthesize the effects of methodology on the ability to detect contemporary evolutionary changes across taxa and habitats. After evaluating the literature on temporal genomic methodology, the group will formulate a decision framework to help guide the design of future studies. They hope to accelerate the use of temporal genomics in understanding evolutionary response to change across systems, taxa, and time.