Dr. Lauren Shoemaker earns NSF CAREER Award to support her research on Niwot Ridge and beyond.

**Researchers working with Shoemaker conduct surveys in experimentally warmed and ambient plots on Niwot Ridge to study the response of alpine plants to rising temperatures.** Pictured left to right: Jane Smith (NWT LTER botanist) , Dusty Gannon (postdoctoral researcher), Mary Uhl (undergraduate technician), and Megan Szojka (PhD student). *Photo by Claire Tortorelli.*

Dr. Lauren Shoemaker, an assistant professor at the University of Wyoming and senior investigator with the Niwot Ridge LTER, uses manipulative experiments to better understand how populations and communities respond to rising temperatures. Her NSF CAREER Award, titled “Impacts of Environmental Filtering vs Species Interactions on Persistence and Coexistence in a Warming World,” will support the expansion of her work across Wyoming and Colorado.

**Sage Ellis collects data on alpine plants in a warming experiment on Niwot Ridge.** Ellis is a PhD student in Ecology at the University of Wyoming where she is advised by Shoemaker. *Photo by Lauren Shoemaker.*

The novelty of Shoemaker’s work lies in her integration global change experiments, demographic modeling, and species coexistence theory to tease the apart biotic and abiotic drivers of temperature-induced changes in patterns at the scale of populations, communities, and ecosystems. Over the coming years, Shoemaker will use support from her NSF CAREER Award to establish the “WyoCo network,” a network of experimental warming sites across Wyoming and Colorado that will serve as a platform for global change research, education, and stakeholder engagement.

**Shoemaker (right) on Niwot Ridge with her former PhD student, Dr. Megan Szojka.** Szojka completed her PhD in spring 2025 and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Ecosystem Management at the University of Guelph. *Photo by Emilie Craig.*

Learn more about Dr. Lauren Shoemaker:

Shoemaker earned her PhD from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2017. After conducting postdoctoral research as a James S. McDonnell Fellow in Complex Systems Science, she joined the Botany Department of the University of Wyoming in 2019. Since then, Shoemaker has attracted a team of undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers to her Shoemaker Ecology Lab to study population dynamics and community stability. Her research on Niwot Ridge began in 2021 through a collaboration with the Suding Lab. Shortly thereafter, Shoemaker applied for and received an NSF grant that allowed her to expand her research in new direction and onto the slopes of Niwot Ridge.

The fact that Shoemaker has established research roots on Niwot Ridge should come as no surprise. The alpine has always been her favorite ecosystem, and it turns out that Niwot runs in her genes: her father did a summer research project on Niwot Ridge as a high-school student many years ago!