About

Professor Eric Peter Palkovacs leads research at the intersection of ecology and evolution, focusing on the eco-evolutionary dynamics of freshwater and coastal ecosystems. His work centers on understanding the bi-directional interactions between ecological and evolutionary processes in nature. Specifically, he examines how evolutionary changes influence populations, communities, and ecosystems, and how these ecological changes in turn affect the course of evolution. This integrative approach allows for a comprehensive understanding of the feedback loops between ecology and evolution in natural systems. To investigate these complex dynamics, Professor Palkovacs employs a diverse array of techniques and methodologies. His research combines surveys of genetic, phenotypic, and ecological variation observed in natural populations with controlled field and laboratory experiments. These approaches enable him to test the underlying mechanisms that drive observed patterns in eco-evolutionary processes. His work addresses fundamental questions in evolutionary ecology while also tackling applied issues relevant to conservation biology and fisheries management. Professor Palkovacs and his lab are based at the Coastal Science Campus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where they contribute to advancing knowledge on the interplay between ecological and evolutionary forces shaping freshwater and coastal environments.

Research topics

• Biology
• Ecology
• Sociology
• Geography
• Fishery
• Social Science
• Evolutionary biology
• Astrophysics
• Physics
• Environmental resource management
• Environmental science

Selected publications

• How North American Universities Are Driving Climate Change Education

  Sustainability · 2026-03-11

  articleOpen access

  Many universities acknowledge a responsibility to address climate change and are actively working to meet this goal in academic programs and undergraduate curricula. This paper provides insights from interviews with university leaders from 20 American and Canadian institutions pursuing climate action via education. Interviewees described a range of initiatives, including new General Education requirements (GEs), cross-disciplinary courses, domain-specific classes, and certificate programs, as well as the establishment of dedicated climate schools. Pathways for curricular change include academic senate climate committees, top-down support from university leadership, bottom-up advocacy and activism from faculty and students, and opportunities to leverage evolving systems. To increase climate-teaching capacity, interviewees reported instituting team teaching, supporting faculty learning opportunities, hiring faculty with climate expertise, and partnering with organizations outside academia. Qualitative data collected during these interviews were thematically coded, revealing significant takeaways including the need to appropriately reward faculty for climate-teaching efforts and to recognize the complementary virtues of high-level courses like GEs with broad reach versus deeper dives for climate-related majors with targeted reach. This paper synthesizes advice from educators who succeeded in increasing climate education at their institutions and concludes with suggestions on how to integrate climate more fully into academia’s educational mission.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Wildfire interacts with land cover to influence mercury concentrations in juvenile steelhead (Oncorhynchus mykiss) in coastal California watersheds

  Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences · 2026-05-12

  articleSenior author

  Wildfire is a growing driver of ecological change in freshwater ecosystems, yet how fire interacts with land cover to affect contaminant exposure in aquatic organisms remains poorly understood. Mercury is a particular concern; concentrations can increase to harmful levels following wildfire. We leveraged the 2020 wildfires in coastal California as a natural experiment to examine how human development and land cover influence total mercury concentrations in juvenile steelhead (Oncorhynchus mykiss). We predicted that human development and forest cover would both increase mercury levels in juvenile steelhead. We measured mercury in fish muscle tissue from 192 fish across paired burned and unburned sub-watersheds in four watersheds. Fire significantly altered mercury in three of four watersheds, but the direction of change depended on development and land cover. As predicted, the watershed with substantial human development showed elevated mercury following fire (+65%). Contrary to expectations, forest cover appeared to reduce fire-driven mercury in wildland watershed. Our results demonstrate that post-fire mercury risk to juvenile steelhead depends on landscape context and highlight the wildland-urban interface as a priority for post-fire contaminant monitoring.

  PublisherDOI

• Data from: Wildfire interacts with land cover to influence mercury concentrations in juvenile steelhead (<em>Oncorhynchus mykiss</em>) in coastal California watersheds

  DRYAD · 2026-03-16

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  This dataset contains muscle tissue mercury concentration measurements from juvenile steelhead, lichen, soil, and water samples collected from burned and unburned watersheds along the central California coast in 2021. Associated spatial covariates include geology, land cover, and burn severity metrics derived from field and remote sensing data. These data support analyses of wildfire and land cover effects on mercury bioaccumulation presented in Abbott et al. The dataset includes raw measurements, metadata, and R code used for data processing and statistical modeling.

  PublisherDOI

• Intraspecific variation in mating behaviour modulates the effects of mosquitofish introduction on prey communities

  Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences · 2026-03-11

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Intraspecific variation is recognized as a driver of ecological processes, yet prior studies have overwhelmingly focused on the ecological effects of intraspecific trait variation driven by natural selection. Far less is known about how variation in sexually selected traits influences ecological outcomes. In this study, we tested whether intraspecific differences in reproductive behaviours affect the ecosystem- and community-level impact of western mosquitofish (Gambusia affinis) introductions. Male mosquitofish frequently harass females through persistent mating attempts. We manipulated the intensity of male harassment and then used a mesocosm experiment to measure the ecological consequences of these differences in harassment. Although this behaviour manipulation was short-lived, our results suggest that differences in harassment intensity affected zooplankton communities. Compared to fish-absent controls, mesocosms with high-harassment males had smaller zooplankton body size and reduced abundance in several dominant taxa. These effects were not observed in low-harassment treatments, suggesting a threshold response in which only high-harassment males elicited community changes. The presence of mosquitofish also caused a trophic cascade to impact phytoplankton biomass; however, the strength of this cascade was not altered by harassment intensity. Our findings demonstrate that sexual selection can shape community composition and shows that reproductive behaviour can modulate the impact of species introduction.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Evolving nature-based solutions for urban resilience

  Science · 2026-05-14

  article

  Despite growing investments in nature-based solutions for urban resilience, their design often overlooks a fundamental biological process: evolution. Populations of organisms that sustain nature-based solutions are dynamic and can evolve over time. Rapid evolutionary changes, driven by urban environmental stressors, such as pollution, climate extremes, and habitat fragmentation, can reshape species' traits, alter interactions, and shift ecosystem functions. We synthesize evidence of evolutionary change across systems that serve as nature-based solutions in urban contexts and show how evolutionary processes can enhance or undermine their performance. We propose four testable hypotheses linking evolutionary dynamics to nature-based solutions and outline design strategies to maintain adaptive potential. Integrating evolution into nature-based solutions is essential to ensure long-term and efficient functionality under accelerating environmental change.

  PublisherDOI

• Author response for "Intraspecific variation in mating behavior modulates the effects of mosquitofish introduction on prey communities"

  2026-01-12

  peer-reviewSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Revealing unseen dynamical regimes of ecosystems from population time-series data

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-06-13 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Many dynamical systems can exist in alternative regimes for which small changes in an environmental driver can cause sudden jumps between regimes. In ecology, predicting the regime of population fluctuations under unobserved levels of an environmental driver has remained an unsolved challenge with important implications for conservation and management. Here, we show that integrating time-series data and information on a putative driver into a Gaussian Process regression model for the system's dynamics allows us to predict dynamical regimes without the need to specify the equations of motion of the system. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate that we can accurately predict fixed-point, cyclic, or chaotic dynamics under unseen levels of a control parameter for a range of simulated population dynamics models. For a model with an abrupt population collapse, we show that our approach goes beyond an early warning signal by characterizing the regime that follows the tipping point. We then apply our approach to data from an experimental microbial food web and from a lake planktonic food web. We find that we can reconstruct transitions away from chaos in the microbial food web and anticipate the dynamics of the oligotrophic regime in the planktonic food web. These results lay the groundwork for making rational decisions about preventing, or preparing for, regime shifts in natural ecosystems and other dynamical systems.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Thermal history mediates the ecological role of body size in a freshwater fish

  Freshwater Science · 2025-06-17

  article

  Intraspecific trait variation among populations may strongly alter community and ecosystem structure and function. Body size is a fundamental trait of all organisms, affecting both organismal physiology and ecological effects, which may differ across populations. For example, body size is predicted to decline with warming. As such, in this study, we aim to determine how population differences in thermal history mediate the ecological role of body size in a freshwater fish. We conducted a mesocosm experiment in which we manipulated fish (Gambusia affinis [Baird and Girard, 1853]) source populations (ambient source vs warm source) and body size while holding their biomass constant. We monitored community and ecosystem response variables including, macroinvertebrate abundance, zooplankton biomass, phytoplankton abundance, and greenhouse gas flux. Changes in fish body size influenced most ecological responses, but these effects often depended on the thermal history of the fish population. For many responses, the effects of reduced fish body size were offset by a history of exposure to warm temperatures, suggesting that environmental factors (including thermal acclimation) and adaptation may offset the community and ecosystem effects of decreased consumer body size. Our research suggests that ecological changes will depend on changes in body size and environmental factors, as well as on other trait changes associated with warming. Experiments and models addressing the ecological effects of body-size decline alone may overestimate the ecological changes expected under warming.

  PublisherDOI

• Author response for "Intraspecific variation in mating behavior modulates the effects of mosquitofish introduction on prey communities"

  2025-11-12

  peer-reviewSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Archaeological evidence across four millennia indicates recent erosion of Chinook salmon age structure in California

  Marine Ecology Progress Series · 2025-09-02

  articleOpen access

  Chinook salmon Oncorhynchus tshawytscha provide crucial ecosystem services, but their populations are in steep decline throughout their native range. Recent decades have seen widespread erosion of age structures, but the lack of long-term baselines makes it difficult to assess this change. We collaborated with the Estom Yumeka Maidu Tribe of Enterprise Rancheria and used otoliths to reconstruct changes in age structure for California Central Valley Chinook salmon over the last 4 millennia. Specifically, we compared the returner age structure of present-day hatchery and natural populations in the Feather and Yuba rivers (2002-2020) with archaeological data from the same watershed, spanning the Middle-Holocene (1800-1000 BCE), Late-Holocene (500-1770 CE), and post-European-contact (1770-1870 CE) periods. We observed a shift to younger ages, from dominantly age-4 returners in the archaeological samples to age-3 fish in both hatchery and natural populations today. The recent time period also shows reduced variance and diversity in return ages compared to the post-European-contact time period, which has the most robust sample size of the archaeological collection. The shift toward younger ages in returning fish may have caused losses in productivity, while the decrease in variance and diversity may have reduced their resilience to environmental stochasticity. The erosion of age structure since European contact suggests anthropogenic factors—such as loss of freshwater and estuarine habitats, and industrialized ocean fishing and hatcheries—as potential contributors. Incorporating archaeological data into ecological assessments can help guard against hidden shifting baselines and inform restoration targets for more resilient populations.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: LTREB: Long-term ecological and evolutionary dynamics of secondary contact

  NSF · $243k · 2021–2027

• Collaborative Research: Testing eco-evolutionary trophic cascades in aquatic ecosystems

  NSF · $276k · 2015–2019

• COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: RAPID: Using river restoration to test the ecological and evolutionary effects of secondary contact

  NSF · $6k · 2013–2016

• COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: Ecological and evolutionary dynamics of secondary contact

  NSF · $430k · 2016–2021

Frequent coauthors

• Michael T. Kinnison

  University of Maine

  29 shared

• David M. Post

  Yale University

  22 shared

• David C. Fryxell

  University of Auckland

  22 shared

• John Carlos Garza

  NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service Southwest Fisheries Science Center

  18 shared

• Kerry Reid

  University of Hong Kong

  17 shared

• Ben A. Wasserman

  14 shared

• Andrew P. Hendry

  McGill University

  14 shared

• Stephan B. Munch

  12 shared