Congratulations to grad student Jake Berv and his co-authors for their important paper on the avian tree of life, which came out this week in Nature! The paper is open-access and the link is here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature15697.html A comprehensive phylogeny of birds (Aves) using targeted next-generation DNA sequencing Although reconstruction of…
Congrats to postdoc Leo Campagna for making the cover of Molecular Ecology with his most recent research paper on seedeaters!
Postdoc Leo Campagna’s new paper on dissecting the complex demographic and phylogenetic history of the Sporophila seedeaters is just out in Molecular Ecology. In addition to revealing new insights into this avian rapid radiation, Leo and his collaborators also make some useful but sobering points about the potential for spurious…
Scott’s cover article in TREE on climate change and hybrid zones: Postdoc Scott Taylor’s synthetic review of how hybrid zones can be powerful tools for tracking climate change is featured on the cover of the current issue of Trends in Ecology and Evolution! Taylor SA, Larson EL, Harrison RG. 2015.…
Graduate students Ben Freeman and Nick Mason have a new paper out in PLOS ONE: Freeman BG, Mason NA (2015) The Geographic Distribution of a Tropical Montane Bird Is Limited by a Tree: Acorn Woodpeckers (Melanerpes formicivorus) and Colombian Oaks (Quercus humboldtii) in the Northern Andes. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0128675.…
Grad student Stepfanie Aguillon has a new paper out that is an extension of her MS research with Rene Duckworth: Duckworth, R.A. and S.M. Aguillon. 2015. Eco-evolutionary dynamics: investigating multiple causal pathways linking changes in behavior, population density and natural selection. Journal of Ornithology. Abstract: Correlations between population density, natural…
Redpolls hit the news, part III … Nick and Scott’s redpoll study has been available for a while in Molecular Ecology’s pre-publication website and it has garnered an impressive amount of outside attention, including coverage in the news section of Science (http://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/17_april_2015?pg=44#pg44), and various popular media outlets and blogs like…
Redpoll study hits the news, part I… The paper on redpoll genomics and transcriptomics by grad Nick Mason and postdoc Scott Taylor is now published in Molecular Ecology: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mec.13140/abstract
Redpoll study hits the news, part II… Nick and Scott’s redpoll paper was paired with a nice commentary piece by Jan Lifjeld at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mec.13244/full … “… Mason & Taylor (2015), using a large data set of genomewide SNPs, verify that [the redpolls] all belong to a single gene pool with…
Postdoc David Toews just had a nice commentary piece titled “A genomic guide to bird population history” published in Current Biology. From the Summary: “How species responded to the climatic oscillations during the past few million years is debated. A new study analyzing the genomes of 38 bird species finds…
Postdoc Scott Taylor has a new review article coming out in Trends in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology on how hybrid zones can serve as powerful windows on the ecological and evolutionary effects of climate change. Read the full paper here.
David mentored the first author, a UBC undergraduate, on this project that used remote field recordings near an urban roost in Vancouver to estimate roost departure time. They found that northwestern crows seemed to maintain a semi-natural circadian rhythm in their roost departures, even with strong variation between days in…
Andy J. Boyce, Benjamin G. Freeman, Adam E. Mitchell, and Thomas E. Martin (2015) Clutch size declines with elevation in tropical birds. The Auk: April 2015, Vol. 132, No. 2, pp. 424-432. Clutch size commonly decreases with increasing elevation among temperate-zone and subtropical songbird species. Tropical songbirds typically lay small…
Nick Mason and Scott Taylor have an (I think) important new paper coming out in Molecular Ecology on the lack of genetic differentiation, but presence of gene expression differences, among redpoll finch “species.” The online-early version is here. Stay tuned for more posts on this study, complete with press releases.…
Kaiser SA, Sillett TS, Risk BB, Webster MS. 2015 Experimental food supplementation reveals habitat-dependent male reproductive investment in a migratory bird. Proc. R. Soc. B 282: 20142523. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.2523 Environmental factors can shape reproductive investment strategies and influ- ence the variance in male mating success. Environmental effects on extrapair paternity have…
Mason, N. A., & Burns, K. J. (2015). The effect of habitat and body size on the evolution of vocal displays in Thraupidae (tanagers), the largest family of songbirds. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 114, 38–551
First-year graduate student Stepfanie Aguillon has a new paper coming out in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology: Aguillon, S.M. and R.A. Duckworth. 2015. Kin aggression and resource availability influence phenotype-dependent dispersal in a passerine bird. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. Abstract: Understanding the causes of dispersal is important as it strongly influences…
Graduate student Jake Berv is a co-author on a paper just out in The Auk that argues for full species status for the population of the Bahama Woodstar (a hummingbird) from the Inagua islands in the Bahamas: Divergence in morphology, calls, song, mechanical sounds, and genetics supports species status for…
This all-species phylogeny for the nine-primaried oscine passerines (a clade of about 800 species of warblers, orioles, blackbirds, tanagers, cardinals, sparrows, and related birds) is the result of a long collaboration between our lab and colleagues at three other institutions.
Congratulations to Ben and his co-authors for their paper which just came out in the Auk. This is Ben’s first paper, and it results in part from his independent research as a high school student, before he even arrived at Cornell! Link to paper: http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1642/AUK-13-260.1