Amy Parachnowitsch

Associate Professor

Biology

Bailey Hall 232

Fredericton

amy.parachnowitsch@unb.ca



Academic interests

  • Evolutionary ecology of flowering plants
  • Plant-insect interactions
  • Anthropomorphic/climate change

Brief biography

Dr. Amy Parachnowitsch joined UNB July 2018. She completed her undergraduate degree (Biology) at Simon Fraser University, her Masters (Botany) at the University of Guelph and her PhD (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) at Cornell University. She then went to Sweden where she was an Assistant Professor at Uppsala University before her move to UNB.

Her research focuses on the evolutionary ecology of flowers and plant-pollinator interactions. Inspired by the diversity of flowers and their interactions with both pollinators and other organisms, her lab seeks to address how and why floral traits evolve. Her research encompasses the ecology and evolution of floral traits, pollinator behaviour, floral chemical ecology, and climate change. Her lab tackles a diverse set of systems, mainly in North America and Sweden.

Outside of academia, Amy enjoys gardening in summer, knitting through the winter, and reading fiction the whole year.

Courses taught

  • BIOL1012. First Year Biology (co-taught with Katy Hind)
  • BIOL3113. Evolutionary Ecology
  • BIOL3453. Plants and People
  • BIOL3541. Plant Ecology (co-taught with Mark Sherrard)

Selected research

References

Parachnowitsch, A. L., & Geber, M. A. (2025). Spatiotemporal variation in selection on floral traits related to abortion rate, predispersal seed predation, and fitness variance. International Journal of Plant Sciences, 186(1).

Rathnayake, R. M. T. K., & Parachnowitsch, A. L. (2025). Drought drives selection for earlier flowering, while pollinators drive selection for larger flowers in the annual plant Brassica rapa. Annals of Botany PLANTS, 17(1), plae070.

García, B., Friberg, M., & Parachnowitsch, A. L. (2021). Spatial variation in scent emission within flowers. Nordic Journal of Botany, 39(7), e03014.

Parachnowitsch, A. L., Manson, J. S., & Sletvold, N. (2019). Evolutionary ecology of nectar. Annals of Botany, 123(2), 247–261.