What do 130 species of sparrow have in common?
Environment is the most important determinant of 130 species of sparrow song! Variation in their songs within-species, that is. You can find the preprint here!
Cowbirds!
Very pleased to announce that we just had a paper accepted at the Wilson Journal of Ornithology. Should be coming out later in 2025 or early 2026! Cowbirds change how they sing when they are in areas with more or less urbanization. You can find the preprint here!
Introgression between Genera?
Systematic Biology, 27 September 2025
What a tricky group, the Polytelini! More work coming from folks at AMNH finds that there's been introgression and gene flow between the Polytelis and Aprosmictus parrots. You can find the paper here!
Most birds are named after physical traits!
PLOS ONE, 11 June 2025
Did you know the most common English Common Name for birds is "African"? Our team of ornithologists, students, and amatuers categorized every single species of bird's common name...in triplicate! You can find the paper here!
Phylogeny and image recognition, together at last
International Conference on Learning Representations, 15 June 2025
Have you heard about Imageomics? It links together everything we can find out about biology via images. This paper tells us about what parts of bird images are in common and associate with phylogeny! You can find the paper here!
Back to bats! But also birds.
Frontiers of Biogeography, 14 April 2025
Bats and birds can generally fly. Despite that, they speciate all the time! What exactly is it about them that makes them start to diverge when they can fly so far? Well, find out here with my excellent colleagues Dr. Sydney Decker and Dr. Bryan Carstens. You can find the paper here!
Painted Bunting! Do you see yourself?
International Conference on Learning Representations, 14 June 2024
Deep learning can analyze images in ways that seem very human like, but they aren't as good yet at telling us how they are making their decisions. But no more! With this project you can now see exactly what part of an image makes a neural network decide a bird is, or is not, a painted bunting. You can find the paper here!
White-crowned Sparrow Songs
Ornithology, 19 December 2023
White-crowned Sparrows in the Pacific Northwest are some of the best studied for their songs. We investigated what changes their songs over space and time. We got the journal cover image, too! You can find the paper here!
Bioacoustics of North American Birds
PLOS ONE, 7 December 2022
After my postdoc at the Ohio State University, I am working on a big-data bioacoustics project. Here I am using convolutional neural network approaches to compare and contrast the songs and calls of North American bird species, both within and between taxa. We hope to determine the relationship between phylogeographic patterning, environmental adaptation, and acoustic communication at the community scale. You can find the paper here!
Comparative Phylogeography of Southwestern Desert Birds
Biogeography, 22 September 2022
My research focuses on 10 species of desert birds distributed across the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts. I am also looking into the genomes themselves to find areas under selection, or areas that are part of genomic islands of speciation. Using whole-genome sequencing, we've discovered the phylogeographic histories of these taxa and compared them. You can find the paper here!
Phylogenetic Discordance
Systematic Biology, 2 August 2022
Parrot phylogenetics has gone through several iterations since I started working on it in Brian Smith's lab at AMNH. This one uses machine learning to investigate discordance between different phylogenetic topologies in some really important clades. You can find the paper here!
Morphological information for All Birds!
Ecology Letters, 24 February 2022
Have you ever wondered how big a particular bird's wing is? Wonder no more! The AVONET database will tell you about the sizes and shapes of 11,000 species of birds. You can find the paper here!
Bats, Poop, and DNA
Biogeography, 02 May 2021
This was a delightful paper to work on with my good friend Dr. Melissa de Waal. Using the DNA extracted from bat poop and other tissues, she was able to discover the kinds of foods and the kinds of bacteria that were found in bat gastrointestinal tracts! You can find the the paper here!
Machine Learning, Evolutionary Simulations, and Phylogeographic Synthesis
Biogeography, 13 April 2021
The first chapter of my dissertation, "Community phylogeographic patterns reveals how a barrier filters and structures taxa in North American warm deserts", has been published in the Journal of Biogeography. Here, my colleagues and I performed a phylogeographic synthesis of plants, vertebrates, and invertebrates that are found in both the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts. We used a machine learning and simulation approach to examine how robust these results are across different evolutionary histories. You can find the the paper here!
Northern Cardinal Songs and Genetics
Ecology and Evolution, 11 December 2018
Our new paper, "Genomic divergence in allopatric Northern Cardinals of the North American warm deserts is linked to behavioral differentiation", has come out in Ecology and Evolution. In this paper, we sequenced ddRAD loci of birds across the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts, discovering that there are two distinct groups of Cardinals. in the region. We also performed playback experiments, looking at how male birds responded to songs from all over the deserts, and found that they did not respond at all to songs from across the barrier between the deserts. You can find the paper here!
Parrot Phylogenetics
The Emu, 1 November 2017
Where it all started! My first publication, "Resolving a phylogenetic hypothesis for parrots: implications from systematics to conservation". Here, we built a new phylogenetic tree of the parrots and relatives (Order: Psittaciformes), determined how these species are distributed over space, and examined crucial sampling gaps needed to assess how this group speciated. You can find the paper here!
