Evan Kelemen

Bryant & Stratton College

As urbanization continues to increase, it is expected that two-thirds of the human population will reside in cities by 2050. Urbanization fragments and degrades natural landscapes, threatening wildlife including economically important species such as bees. In this study, we employ whole genome sequencing to characterize the population genetics, met...

Deciphering processes that contribute to genetic differentiation and divergent selection of natural populations is useful for evaluating the adaptive potential and resilience of organisms faced with various anthropogenic stressors. Insect pollinator species, including wild bees, provide critical ecosystem services but are highly susceptible to biod...

Historic and contemporary data can shed light on a species’ conservation status and work together to address two main goals in conservation biology: (1) identifying species under extinction risk and (2) the forces shaping this process. Museomics is the study of historical DNA acquired from museum specimens that allows researchers to answer myriad q...

Body size is a key feature of any organism, influencing almost every aspect of its life history. Social insects provide an interesting model to study body size, because they often exhibit a high degree of worker size variation within the colony. Size variation is often studied in the lab, sometimes using commercially purchased colonies; therefore,...

Conserving bees is critical both ecologically and economically. Genetic tools are valuable for monitoring these vital pollinators since tracking these small, fast‐flying insects by traditional means is difficult. By surveying the current state of the literature, this review discusses how recent advances in landscape genetic and genomic research are...

Anthropogenic activities are rapidly changing the environment, and species that do not respond face a higher risk of extinction. Species may respond to environmental changes by modifying their behaviors, shifting their distributions, or changing their morphology. Recent morphological responses are often measured by changes in body size. Changes in...

Complex systems (e.g. eusocial insect colonies) exhibit emergent behaviours as a result of the interactions of their components. These components often vary in several traits. Such variation may improve system performance by increasing its efficiency or its robustness to environmental change. These two outcomes, efficiency and robustness, are often...

The rate of living theory posits that higher metabolic rates negatively affect lifespan. This relationship would influence trade-offs among life history traits associated with energy production and allocation. These trade-offs may also apply within a species, resulting in differences among individuals in life history traits. In this study, we use t...

Phenotypic variation within biological systems is ubiquitous and often assumed to be adaptive in social insects. Local environmental factors, such as temperature, may affect the phenotypic variation produced, and yield insights into the mechanisms that generate this group-level outcome. For instance, fine-scale heterogeneity in temperature across t...

Songs of the Carolina Chickadee (Poecile carolinensis) vary throughout the species' geographic range. The aim of this study was to investigate quantitatively the repertoires of individual Carolina Chickadees in southeastern Pennsylvania. Previous qualitative work in the same region identified two song types produced with different degrees of consis...