Spatial Data Platform: Sky-high progress Cutting-edge observation techniques are giving RMBL research studies new life. Think of a field plot that scientists have monitored for nearly 12 years to see how the plants are responding to climate change.
Jill Anderson Jill Anderson is an evolutionary ecologist interested in natural plant populations. After earning her undergraduate degree at Brown University, she worked as a tropical field biologist in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Costa Rica. She earned her PhD from Cornell University, developing a strong interest in local adaptation in plant populations. Ian Breckheimer Ian Breckheimer, PhD, is a landscape ecologist and research scientist in spatial ecology and data synthesis at RMBL. After earning his PhD from University of Washington, he completed an NSF postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. As RMBL’s Spatial Data Platform developer, Dr. Breckheimer links field measurements of ecological processes to their landscape context via imagery collected from drones, airplanes, and satellites.
time. “RMBL has been at the forefront of our studies of plant and animal responses to climate change,” she says. “Much of what we know is due to researchers who have monitored plots for decades.” The rockcress study has piqued the interest of global science. It was published in the May 2025 issue of the prestigious journal Science . As RMBL continues developing novel tools to push scientists’ research into the future — like high-resolution climate maps and datasets produced from remote sensing — scientists will find answers needed to keep our planet, and those living on it, thriving.
Observations on the ground would reveal changes occurring, but understanding how the plot’s microclimate leads to those changes would require something able to produce a comprehensive, high-definition map of the plot’s environment over space and time. Something like a drone.
collaboration of Dr. Jill Anderson, evolutionary
time, Dr. Breckheimer has flown drones above the gardens, collected data, and built environmental models of the sites. These show how water moves through the plots, when they experience snowmelt and snowfall, and other climate variations. Documenting each garden’s environment at a micro scale helps Dr. Anderson’s team improve its models of plant performance. Drummond’s rockcress itself is a robust model for how climate change is affecting the ecology and evolution of all plants. So far, Dr. Anderson is seeing that natural populations are declining at the lowest elevations, which have become hotter and drier over the last decade. Her team used genetic data to model whether the species can migrate up the mountain to a more hospitable climate, but their findings suggest that it can’t move fast enough to outrun climate change.
responding to climate change. The species grows across a broad elevational gradient, and populations are strongly adapted to their local climates. Plants at low elevations have adapted to early snowmelt, and high elevation plants are at home with later snowmelt. Might this adaptability influence the plant’s capacity to respond to climate change? To find out, Dr. Anderson created five experimental gardens distributed across multiple elevations and microclimates. Within each garden, she transplanted more than 100,000 seeds and seedlings, generated by seeds from more than 90 natural populations. Then she manipulated the gardens’ environments to mimic climate change, including removing
ecologist and Professor at the University of Georgia, and Dr. Ian Breckheimer, landscape ecologist and RMBL’s Spatial Data Platform czar. Dr. Anderson started an experiment in 2013 to learn how a native flowering mustard plant, Drummond’s rockcress, is
This is the idea behind the
The mid-elevation garden on October 6, 2013, immediately before planting. photo by Jill Anderson
Boechera stricta in flower in a meadow in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. photo by Jill Anderson
A grid used to monitor experimentally transplanted seeds, placed in natural vegetation at a mid-elevation common garden. photo by Jill Anderson
Yet, Dr. Anderson wonders if assisted gene flow might help local populations fare better. Assisted gene flow is a tool that conservation biologists have developed to help seeds escape the immediate effects of climate change by moving them to higher
elevations and higher latitudes. This tool can introduce important genetic diversity into populations in those historically cooler locations, possibly forestalling extinctions.
snow, adding snow, and increasing temperatures.
To map the ecological changes of the dispersed plots over
Fortunately, Dr. Anderson is in the right place at the right
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