Yellow-bellied marmots are a hibernating species of rodent in the Rocky Mountains whose hibernation emergence has become earlier as climate change makes snow melt earlier. This gives them more time to forage for food, which has increased their mass and population size. The mechanism of this change remains unknown, but we suspect that it may involve DNA methylation, a form of gene regulation that allows organisms to adapt to changing and highly variable environments. Working with PhD candidate Stavi Tennenbaum, I collected DNA methylation data using a novel process called reduced representation enzymatic methylation sequencing, a protocol that uses a series of enzymes to cut DNA into fragments and identify methylated and unmethylated DNA, which uses smaller amounts of DNA than traditional methods. I then built a model using Bayesian statistics to identify the emergence time of the marmots from their observation data and climate data, then connected the emergence time to the methylation data collected across the whole genome. This did not reveal a correlation between genome-wide methylation patterns and hibernation emergence. However, methylation may still be involved with this process; if specific regions of the genome are methylated differently, this would not have changed the genome-wide methylation frequency by much, but could still have important impacts. Looking at specific regions of the genome is an important future direction of this project. This project also demonstrated that the novel EM-Seq method works well on marmot DNA, suggesting that this method should be used in future methylation studies.