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How can plants adapt to their environment, and how will they be able to adapt to climate change? Those are among the biggest questions Johanna Schmitt has sought to answer during her career as a plant geneticist and evolutionary ecologist.

— Annie to her friends and colleagues — said she has always been interested in phenotypic plasticity — the way plants grow differently based on their environment; say, the way a plant will grow tall and skinny if crowded by neighbors or shorter and wider if it has plenty of space.

“I've always been interested in the question of, are plants adapted to the environments they live in?” she said.

That research has taken Schmitt across the United States and Europe, studying the way wildflowers like thale cress and mountain jewelflower grow differently based on changes in temperature, rainfall and the timing of seasons.

“One of my contributions is just this idea that phenotypic plasticity is a trait that in itself can evolve,” Schmitt said. “And that led into being interested in how the effects of genes depend upon the environment, what are the specific genetic mechanisms that allows plants to sense and respond to environmental signals, and what are their effects on fitness?” 

The way plants adapt can be seen as a preview of how they might fare in the face of ongoing, rapid climate change. For example, as rains come later in California, plants have less time to grow before the summer heat bears down on them, Schmitt said.

“The plants try to catch up,” she said. “They accelerate their flowering to get some seed production in, but that plasticity can’t entirely compensate for the shorter growing season and they don’t make as many seeds.”

She has led experiments like one where she and colleagues grew many genetic lines of thale cress from across the species’ native Eurasian climate range in experimental gardens in five different locations across Europe — from Spain’s Mediterranean climate to Finland, on the edge of the Arctic Circle. They found that plants native to warmer areas did better than the local varieties, which hadn’t yet adapted to their warming locales.

“In Germany, it wasn't the German ones that did the best, it was the Spanish ones,” she said. “As it's gotten warmer, the local populations have not evolved fast enough to keep up with the changing climate.”

Schmitt said she has always been interested in the natural world, but her love for plants was first sparked by an undergraduate plant taxonomy class at Swarthmore College. That class and its instructor made a major impact on Schmitt.

When James Hickman, who had taught the class, died in 1993, Schmitt was among the co-authors of in Madroño, the research journal published by the California Botanical Society.

After earning a Ph.D. at Stanford and continuing her studies at Duke University, Schmitt spent 30 years at Brown University, mentoring a small group of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers and many undergraduate researchers. In 2008, while at Brown, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

She said during those years, she kept a short list of the types of places that could convince her to take a new job. At the top of that list was �����о��� because of its “amazing ecology and evolution faculty and [for being] one of the best places in the world for plant biology.”

She “jumped” at the chance to come to �����о��� in 2012, and has been here ever since. She praised her collaborators on campus and said Davis’ location near a variety of differing climates has helped her research.

“If you can just go along an elevational gradient and see all these different climates, then it's perfect for studying climate change questions,” she said.

Now transitioned to an emerita role at ������� but still involved in research, Schmitt expressed dismay at recent federal funding cuts to work connected to climate change, and said the subject will continue to be vital and deserving of attention.

“The climate is going to be changing faster because nobody's putting a brake on it anymore,” she said. “So the need is really there.”