Songbirds dwarf all other avian lineages when it comes to their morphological, life history, and species diversity. But, inferring their evolutionary history has been a major challenge because of a lack of resolution in the tree. A plethora of co-authors and I, led by Carl Oliveros, just published a new and well resolved phylogeny, including every recognized passerine family. Article is open access here.
Today, I have officially begun my position as Bird Curator in the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate at the Zoological Museum of the University of Copenhagen. I'm excited to work in a new country, in a department full of fantastic scientists. I'll be working hard on securing funding for postdocs and students in collaborative projects based on museum collections!
I'm excited to announce that I have accepted a position to join the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Copenhagen. My new position will be Bird Curator at the Zoological Museum, within the Center for Macroecology, Evolution, and Climate.
After I am settled, I will initiate avian projects to suit a variety of topics related to ornithology, which will include (but are not limited to) genomics, biogeography, anthropogenic change, and creative use and digitization of specimen collections. All projects will be in close collaboration with the fantastic faculty, postdocs, and students at CMEC. Swifts are among the birds with the most conservative plumage and morphology, and identifying many species in the field (and even the hand) is problematic to say the least. As such, identifying species limits are p oroblematic as well. In a new paper, colleagues and I present the first phylogeny of the Chaetura swifts, the genus that includes familiar Chimney and Vaux's swifts in North America, and a number of enigmatic taxa from the Tropical Americas. On one hand, several recognized species were paraphyletic. On the other, several relatively distinctive or widely disjunct taxa were surprisingly closely related to congeners. Paper is posted here.
Over the past ten years or so, colleagues and I at the University of Kansas and Philippine National Museum have been working up various projects examining the phylogeography of the Philippine avifauna. A clear pattern in almost every dataset was that widespread "species" contained multiple divergent clades, which often corresponded to discrete differences in plumage or morphology and biogeographic barrers. Yet, this diversity is overlooked in terms of conservation recognition and conservation planning. We recently published a paper synthesizing several previous studies, supplemented with some new data, here.
Shortwings (Brachypteryx) are widespread throughout tropical Asia, and are perhaps most notable for their beautiful songs. They also have some of the deepest genetic structure among classically recognized bird "species". In a new paper, my Co-authors and I describe their complex colonization history in the Philippines, which includes back-colonization of Palawan from the Oceanic islands, and apparent secondary contact and parapatry of two lineages on Mindanao. The latter observation supports previous observational evidence based on those cool songs. There is still a lot of work to be done on this group in mainland Asia though! Read more about it here.
The old KU niche modeling group has a new paper out in Systematic Biology about how inferring niche evolution based on correlative models (like the popular MaxEnt) for species on a phylogeny can produce biased results if some important assumptions aren't met by every clade member. This particular bias is prevalent when taxa have modeled distributions that are limited by a geographic barrier (i.e., water), rather than the environmental conditions. You can read about our new paper here.
I'm excited to announce that I am beginning a new position as a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, working with Terry Chesser, Helen James, and Rob Fleischer on rail evolution.
One unusual aspect about the island of Borneo is that some birds have closely related populations, mostly regarded as subspecies, that replace each other geographically but without any obvious present day barriers. In a few of these birds there is also an elevational component, with one population replacing the other as forests transition from lowland to montane. Studies relying mostly on mitochondrial DNA have documented some divergence between these subtly different populations, but mtDNA can be a misleading marker across hybrid zones, and under-represent introgression. To infer if secondary contact has resulted in introgression or reproductive isolation across an elevational boundary, we (myself, Rob Moyle, Joe Manthey, Fred Sheldon) used RADseq to generate a whole lot of data. The results were stark--- strong population structure and no evidence of gene flow between three focal population pairs, which we should now be calling separate species. Read about it here.
Pheasants, partridges, and allies generally don't cross water barriers. Those on islands are there because sea levels rose around them. The major exception are the Old World quails, which have very small body sizes, are migratory, and highly dispersive; they've reached small islands in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. So, how did endemic partridges reach Madagascar and New Guinea? In a new paper in PRSL, Joe Tobias, Ed Braun, Rebecca Kimball and I show that they did so as 'quails'. These partridges are nested within the Old World quail clade, and morphological reconstructions support that their morphologies have independently converged on those of partridges from a quail-like ancestor following trans-marine colonization. You can read about it here.
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