News

Earlier this week Scott was awarded the 2021 Bicentenary Medal by the Linnean Society in a virtual ceremony. The award, which comes in the form of a silver medal initially cast to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus’ death, is given to one scientist under the age...

As of June 1, 2021 Scott will be the Director of the CU Boulder Mountain Research Station (MRS) as well as a Fellow of the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR). Scott will be taking over from Dr. Bill Bowman who has been station Director for 31 years. Leading...

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...

Every year biologists from all three University of Toronto campuses as well as the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) participate in the Atwood Colloquium. In addition to featuring talks from U of T graduate students, postdocs, and faculty, three guest speakers are invited. This year Scott was invited as the "Rising...

Sheela successfully defended her thesis on March 31st and is officially a doctor! Her dissertation work combined field-based behavioral experiments with whole-genome sequencing to study the behavioral traits that limit interbreeding between incipient avian species. Sheela will be joining Dr. Kristen Ruegg's lab at Colorado State University as a postdoc...

Congratulations to Sheela for publishing a large part of her PhD thesis in Science! This work, led by Sheela in close collaboration with Dr. Leo Campagna , combines whole genome sequencing with incredibly challenging field studies of mating behavior in two Sporophila seedeaters. It provides exciting evidence that the Iberá...

Mia has recently received funding from both the Denver Field Ornithologists and Colorado Field Ornithologists! She will use these grants to help set up her summer pilot project, as part of her PhD research, to explore how urbanization and elevation affects chickadee nestling development and behaviors exhibited within the nest...

Cori and Erik recently gave talks about their Denver Feild Ornithologists funded reseach to a packed virtual house with over 100 guests. Cori's first public talk, during which she detailed her findings from using DNA metabarcoding to determine what black-capped and mountain chickadees feed their young, was a smashing success...

Scott recently gave a talk titled "Guarding the world's finest guano: a story of ecology and economy" to the Broomfield Birding Club. The talk was focussed on the islands that Scott visited during his PhD fieldwork in Peru and Chile. These islands, the famous guano islands, have an amazing history...

In a new paper just published in Nature Communications, we uncover a long-standing mystery of genetic architecture of the head plumage differences between alba and personata subspecies of the white wagtail. Read about our findings here and also check out "Behing the paper" blog post and a press release in...