Amy Waananen

Amy Waananen is a member of the 2025-2027 “Future of Species Range Shift” cohort in the CASC Network Climate Adaptation Postdoctoral Fellows Program. She is working with the Midwest CASC at the University of Minnesota, where her research focuses on understanding how intraspecific variation across species ranges will shape future range shift dynamics. 
 
Amy’s research interests center around understanding how organisms respond to global change and the implications of this for people making decisions about conservation and management. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute on the Environment, where she worked on topics including cooperative seed networks for ecological restorations, maladaptation and its parallels in evolutionary biology, and the hardiness of assisted migration tree plantings to late spring freeze events. Her dissertation work focused on the ecological and evolutionary consequences of habitat fragmentation in the tallgrass prairie for populations of narrow-leaved purple coneflower. Outside of work, you will find Amy in the garden or on the trails around Minneapolis.