Emma Chandler, a graduate student in the DeMarche lab in Plant Biology had quite an eventful research summer in 2025 and this is her report.

 

Last summer I crossed Alaska, from Anchorage to the edge of the Arctic Ocean, studying a tiny, but tough wildflower called Cushion Pink (Silene acaulis). Populations of this species have been tracked for 30 years in long-term monitoring plots and are vulnerable to climate change, particularly in the southern part of their range. Cushion pink is gynodioecious, which means some plants have only female flowers that produce seeds and some plants are hermaphrodites that produce both, seeds and pollen. 

 

Female and hermaphrodite plants may respond to climate conditions in different ways, impacting their populations when confronting climate change. To study that, I visited two long-term monitoring sites, one in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and the other in the Arctic near Toolik Field Station. At each site I recorded the sex of individual plants in the study and surveyed the populations to determine their sex ratio (the relative number of females and hermaphrodites in the population) throughout Alaska. Using these data, I will disentangle the effects of climate on females and hermaphrodites and how it might affect wildflower populations.

 

Thanks for sharing, Emma!