When you say go looking for things like climate adaptation, w- what kind of signals in the genome are you looking for? How do you use DNA to make those connections?

So we, we use DNA and statistical approaches to relate the genetic variation that we see in populations to the environments that they come from.

So if we are going out to the field and we're sampling a population where we want to extract its DNA, we have an understanding of where that population came from, and we can use modeling to understand its mean annual temperature, the mean annual precipitation.

And so, uh, we can use that understanding of the environment and make associations between genetic variation-

Like, very specific to the systems you're in, the species you're studying, what have hybrids taught you over the years? Like, what are the unique things you're finding in these hybrid zones?

So I guess to date, and, um, we found that sometimes hybrids can, um, display traits that exceed that of the parental parents.

So in one of the systems that we studied, which was a hybrid zone, a natural hybrid zone between Sitka spruce on the West Coast, and white spruce more to the continental, uh, environment of the Rocky Mountains, we found that, um, the hybrid genotypes at moderately cold temperatures were way more cold-tolerant than either of the pure parental species.