The Tempo and Mode of Toxicant Sensitivity Evolution

Ecotoxicology is concerned with measuring species component fitness responses to toxicants, data that is of great interest to evolutionary biologists. Through leveraging this already collected data, I explore patterns of toxicant sensitivity evolution through meta-analysis and comparative approaches, and test the predictive power of toxicant sensitivity evolution models using lab experiments on untested taxa. I also explore the impact of phylogenetic non-independance on the constuction of species sensitivity distributions (SSDs), the tool of choice for the field of ecotoxicology.