University of Georgia Professor Jill Anderson has received the 2026 W.S. Cooper Award from the Ecological Society of America (ESA). The Cooper Award honors the authors of an outstanding publication in the field of geobotany, physiographic ecology, plant succession, or the distribution of plants along environmental gradients.

The award is the culmination of nearly 15 years of work for Anderson, an evolutionary ecologist with a joint appointment in the Odum School of Ecology and the Department of Genetics in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. She and collaborators Ian Breckheimer, Megan DeMarche (UGA plant biology), Derek Denney, James Santangelo and Susana Wadgymar were honored for their paper “Adaptation and gene flow are insufficient to rescue a montane plant under climate change,”published in Science in 2025. 

The study examined how a widespread mountain plant called Boechera stricta responds to climate change. At the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, Anderson and her co-authors planted more than 100,000 seeds and seedlings in experimental gardens at different elevations to test how the plants performed under current and warmer climate conditions. The researchers found that although the species is widespread and adaptable, climate change is already threatening their survival, and they may eventually need human help moving to cooler habitats as temperatures rise.

“People often think that rare or endangered species are more susceptible to the effects of climate change,” Anderson says. “What we found is that an extremely common species with a very broad geographic distribution, [capable of living] in many different locations, is currently being threatened by climate change because local populations are so highly adapted to their historical climates.”

The study underscores how climate change and disturbance operate across scales, from plant adaptation to long-term ecosystem change.

Anderson and her co-authors will formally receive the award at ESA’s upcoming annual meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah. The awards ceremony will take place Monday, July 27, at 8 a.m. at the Salt Palace Convention Center.

Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, founded in 1928, is among the nation’s oldest field stations. Located at 9,500 feet above sea level in Gothic, Colorado, RMBL supports around 200 scientists each summer and maintains one of the most extensive collections of long-term ecological data in the world.