ORTEGA MAYAGOITIA ELIZABETH

Information:

My research area is the evolutionary ecology of lacustrine plankton. Each lake is a unique and extraordinarily complex environment; the populations living in them are subject to various evolutionary processes that explain a significant portion of the past, present, and future of their communities.

There are three particular aspects that interest me. The first one relates to the adaptation of populations to the changing environmental conditions that each lake provides, including factors such as temperature, food availability, predation risk, among others. This line of research allows us to assess the influence of both past and present environments in terms of biological fitness, phenotypic plasticity, local adaptation, and more.

The second aspect is related to the first and concerns the evolution of reproductive barriers between populations from different lakes. These barriers arise as a consequence of adaptation to contrasting environments, leading to diversification and speciation. These processes have been sparsely studied in planktonic organisms, especially in lacustrine environments.

The third aspect is connected to the previous ones and involves investigating how global climate change is affecting lacustrine species by altering environmental variables to which they are adapted. It is essential to invest our efforts in understanding how changes in factors such as ultraviolet radiation, overexploitation of aquifers, salinity, and rainfall patterns, among others, will impact our tropical lakes and the communities living within them. Given that humans largely depend on lakes for their water supply, this is a topic that should be a priority on our agendas.

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