Gavia Lertzman-Lepofsky
Projet
Adaptive community dynamicsI am post-doc with Mark Vellend (University of Sherbrooke) and with the Leverhulme Center for Anthropocene Biodiversity. My research asks how environment, evolutionary history, and human impacts interact to shape community structure at large scales. My postdoctoral work tests and expands 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 temporal turnover.
Publications
1- Consequences of Deforestation on Functional Community Structure Reverse at High ElevationsLertzman-Lepofsky, Gavia, Luke O. Frishkoff, D. Luke Mahler
2026 The American Naturalist
2- Lizard Thermal Physiology Drives Abundance Peaks along Climate Gradients but Only Weakly Predicts Distributional Limits
Lange, Zachary K., Brooke L. Bodensteiner, Daniel J. Nicholson, Gavia Lertzman-Lepofsky, Alexander H. Murray, Edita Folfas, Saúl Domínguez-Guerrero, D. Luke Mahler, Martha M. Muñoz, Luke O. Frishkoff
2025 The American Naturalist
3- Temporal changes in taxon abundances are positively correlated but poorly predicted at the global scale
Lertzman‐Lepofsky, Gavia, Aleksandra J. Dolezal, Mia Tayler Waters, Alexandre Fuster‐Calvo, Emily N. Black, Stephanie Flaman, Sam Straus, Ryan E. Langendorf, Isaac Eckert, Sophia Fan, Haley A. Branch, Nathalie Isabelle Chardon, Courtney G. Collins
2024 Ecography
4- Evolutionary opportunity and the limits of community similarity in replicate radiations of island lizards
Frishkoff, Luke Owen, Gavia Lertzman‐Lepofsky, D. Luke Mahler
2022 Ecology Letters
5- Water loss and temperature interact to compound amphibian vulnerability to climate change
Lertzman‐Lepofsky, Gavia F., Amanda M. Kissel, Barry Sinervo, Wendy J. Palen
2020 Global Change Biology
6- 11,500 y of human–clam relationships provide long-term context for intertidal management in the Salish Sea, British Columbia
Toniello, Ginevra, Dana Lepofsky, Gavia Lertzman-Lepofsky, Anne K. Salomon, Kirsten Rowell
2019 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
7- Ecological constraints associated with genome size across salamander lineages
Lertzman-Lepofsky, Gavia, Arne Ø. Mooers, Dan A. Greenberg
2019 Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
