Morgan Tingley, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA, and visiting graduate researcher Austin Spence were awarded the Ecography Award for Excellence in Ecology and Evolution, or E4 Award, for their paper illustrating how species’ ability to adapt to climate change is limited by many factors other than climate, including oxygen, light, pressure, pH and water availability.
To escape warming temperatures, species are moving toward the poles to higher elevations and to deeper waters. However, conservation scientists are concerned that some species aren’t moving fast enough, while others aren’t moving at all. Tingley’s paper develops a framework to help conservation biologists and other scientists understand why species might not be able to move to areas with more favorable temperatures.
The E4 Award is given to early career research scientists for exceptional work on population and community ecology, macroecology, biogeography, ecological genetics, historical ecology, evolution, macroevolution and conservation. The paper will be published along with six other accepted papers in a special edition of the journal Ecography.
Tingley’s research addresses both fundamental and applied ecological questions of how species respond to large-scale and predominantly anthropogenic changes to their environments, particularly the effects of climate change on bird communities. He has extensive experience in temperate mountain systems, focusing primarily on California’s Sierra Nevada.
After serving as an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut and as a David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellow at Princeton University, Tingley joined the faculty at UCLA in 2020. He is an elected fellow of the American Ornithological Society and a research associate with the Institute for Bird Populations. He is a recipient of the Wings Across the Americas conservation award from the U.S. Forest Service and the Young Professional Award from the Cooper Ornithological Society. His research papers have been covered widely by the press, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.
