Congratulations to Megan de Marche! At the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America, Dr. de Marche, Haines Family Associate Professor in Plant Ecology, was awarded the 2026 W.S. Cooper Award for a paper that she coauthored with Dr. Jill Anderson (Genetics) and that was published in Science last year: Anderson et al., “Adaptation and gene flow are insufficient to rescue a montane plant under climate change” Science (2025), 

William S. Cooper was a pioneer of physiographic ecology and geobotany, with a particular interest in the influence of historical factors — such as glaciations and climate history — on the pattern of contemporary plant communities. The Cooper Award honors the authors of an outstanding publication in the field of geobotany, physiographic ecology, plant succession or the distribution of plants along environmental gradients.

The  paper provides a large-scale empirical test of how evolutionary processes shape plant persistence under climate change. Using more than 100,000 seeds and seedlings from 115 populations of Boechera stricta transplanted across five elevational common gardens, the study quantified fitness across the full life cycle under current and simulated future climatic conditions. The results show strong local adaptation across the species’ climatic niche, but also demonstrate that climate change has already disrupted long-standing patterns. The study shows that natural gene flow is insufficient to rescue high-elevation populations under warming scenarios, and adaptive capacity is constrained by limited genetic variation for fitness under hotter, drier conditions. Collectively, these findings indicate that assisted migration may be necessary for persistence of these plants across elevational gradients and reveal important limits to adaptation in montane plant systems.