She showed conclusively that temperate- and boreal-forest species migrated at different rates and in different directions while forming a changing mosaic of communities.
[1][2] Early in her career, she challenged the standard methods and prevailing interpretations of the data and fostered rigorous analysis in palynology.
In 1982 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and, in 1993, received the Eminent Ecologist Award from the Ecological Society of America.
[8] Davis received a B.A from Radcliffe College (1953), a PhD in biology from Harvard University (1957)[9] and an honorary M.S.
There she became interested in the vegetational history of the Quaternary period, focusing her research on pollen deposits from Greenland.
She then obtained a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation and worked initially at Harvard before continuing her paleoecological research in the geology department at the California Institute of Technology for two years.
She then spent a year at Yale University as a research fellow, studying vegetation composition and pollen sedimentation in lakes.
After her postdoctoral positions at Caltech and Yale, Davis joined the botany department at the University of Michigan in 1961 as a research associate.
[1][2] This work has been influential in predicting the migration of tree species that may result from global climate changes.
[7] She also hypothesized that disease caused the decline in hemlock populations about 5,300 years ago in the northeastern US.