Congratulations to Johanna and Erik for the recent publication of Johanna's honors thesis in Ornithology! Johanna and Erik worked closely together and combined acoustic and genomic analyses to clarify differetiation and species limits in the North American meadowlarks. Their results clearly show that Lilian's Meadowlark is both acoustically and genomically distinct from Eastern and Western meadowlarks, even though it is currently considered a subspecies of the Eastern Meadowlark. It's time to reconsider how many meadowlark species there are in North America!
The drawings here by Johanna show the slight plumage variations between the three species which belie the significant differences in both song and genomic variation reported in the new publicaion.
Johanna will be starting her PhD with Dr. David Toews at Pennsylvania State University this fall! Congratulations from everyone in the Lab!