Elizabeth M Wolkovich

Biography

Elizabeth M Wolkovich is a Professor in Forest and Conservation Sciences and Canada Research Chair at the University of British Columbia where she runs the Temporal Ecology Lab. Her lab focuses on understanding how climate change shapes plants and plant communities, with a focus on shifts in the timing of seasonal development (e.g., budburst, flowering and fruit maturity)—known as phenology—and their underlying cues to chilling, forcing and photoperiod. Her lab collects new data and collates existing data to provide global estimates of shifts in phenology with warming, including impacts on winegrowing regions. In particular, she studies how climate change will affect different winegrape varieties, and how shifting varieties may help growers develop climate-smart and resilient vineyards with warming. Her research benefits from an interdisciplinary team of collaborators from agriculture, biodiversity science, climatology, and evolution, as well as from shared long-term datasets from across North America and Europe.