1. What do you study related to biodiversity (what are your research questions, what organisms do you work on)?
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 My students and I study genetic structure in tropical animals. My own research is on birds, but some of my students also study frogs and bats. When we say “genetic structure” we mean that we are investigating how populations within species and closely related species are related to one another in terms of the similarity in their basic genetic material (DNA).
When we gather information on genetic structure for different organisms we can begin to understand what factors have influenced their evolution. For conservation purposes, data on genetic structure can tell you about the status and distinctiveness of populations and these data can help argue for the need to conserve habitat if that habitat harbors genetically differentiated populations.
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2. How do you study biodiversity (for example, what technological tools and methodologies do you use in your research)?
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I start with fieldwork where I collect specimens for research. These specimens are representatives of the populations and species that I am studying. Back at the museum, I gather genetic data in the form of DNA sequences from the specimens. This is done in the Museum’s Pritzker Laboratory. With these sequences of DNA, I can piece together trees of the evolutionary relationships between populations.
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3. Where do you study biodiversity?
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I have worked in Amazonian Bolivia and Brazil in South America and more recently in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in Africa. I also have been involved on projects studying genetic structure in birds of Madagascar and the Bird Division hopes to establish collaborative programs for training with the Royal Kingdom of Bhutan.
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4. How might your research have implications for biological conservation?
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 Effective conservation depends on good science. If you do not know what you’re trying to conserve, you may not do a very good job of conserving it. The data I gather tell people about the genetic distinctiveness of populations and this can greatly affect decisions on what should be conserved.
For example, looking at a map of the Amazon Basin you might think that the extensive forests there are completely connected to one another; however, our data for birds shows that there are often genetically distinctive populations within so-called species across the Amazon Basin. This means that the Amazon Basin is not a homogenous blob of forest, but a complex association of forest blocks where animal populations have been evolving separately in different blocks for up to several million years.
From a conservation perspective, this means that you cannot conserve all or even most of the biodiversity in Amazonia by preserving forest in a few regions with lower human populations, because each region has evolutionarily distinct populations.
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5. How did you become interested in science? What made you want to be a scientist, and how did you get to The Field Museum?
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I have watched birds as a hobby since my Dad got me interested at the age of 9. There are few places in the world that do not have interesting birds. In college, I realized that I might be able to study birds as a fulltime job and that’s what I decided to do. My love for the tropics also developed at an early age because of family trips.
In high school and college, I worked as a volunteer in a vaccination program in Ecuador and on a bird-banding project in Brazil. I attended the University of Arizona and got my doctorate at Louisiana State University. Before coming to The Field Museum, I spent several years at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
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6. Describe important collaborations for your scientific endeavors (describe your work with other researchers, organizations, or scientific groups, local or indigenous peoples, etc.)
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My research includes training and collaboration everywhere I work. The only way that conservation is going to succeed in most parts of the world is if we help create a cadre of scientists in each country that can study and explain the value of biological diversity to their own people. As a result we have brought researchers to Chicago from all over the world to work in and learn from our collections, and we have conducted training programs focused on skills necessary to document biodiversity in countries where we work so that biodiversity documentation can be effectively transmitted to future generations. This includes training on how to establish, preserve and use data rich collections of local fauna.
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