Published: September 12, 2011

UC Davis graduate student Jennifer Phillips gets scholarship award to work in Bird Collections

John Bates, Curator and Section Head, Life Sciences, Negaunee Integrative Research Center

Jennifer Phillips, a doctoral student from the University of California, Davis has been working long hours in our bird collection for six weeks now.  

Jennifer Phillips, a doctoral student from the University of California, Davis has been working long hours in our bird collection for six weeks now.  She was able to come to the museum with support from the Museum’s visiting scholarship program.  This means that her application beat out stiff competition for support, because our scholarship committee, ably headed by Associate Curator of Insects, Petra Sierwald, never has enough money to provide support for all the great applications we get to work in the collections.

Jennifer is studying a set of predictions associated with Gloger’s rule.  If you have never had a class in biogeography, you may never have heard on it, but Gloger’s Rule denotes a pattern often seen in birds and mammals where populations in more humid regions are darker than populations from drier areas (see the thumbnail photo of Song Sparrow specimens from wetter and drier parts of California).  Jennifer is taking museum collections and Gloger’s rule in a novel way to study responses of North American birds to climate change.  This is the kind of project that requires access to old and modern series of species.  We have extensive collections of North American birds from the early and mid 1900’s as well as modern series of many Midwestern breeders and migrants.  Such series, including the modern Great Horned Owls she is working on in the picture, are exactly what Jennifer needed.  As good as our collections are, we do not have everything, so she’s gathering data in other museum collections like those of the University of Michigan’s Museum of Zoology. In the past, scientists would have used a reference series or a color guide (like paint chips from a paint store) to grade the comparative darkness of specimens.  Jennifer is taking the modern approach and using a spectrophotometer that can quantify the coloration of different parts of a specimen.  Providing access to our collections for projects like these by students using new approaches are an essential part of our mission as a scientific and academic institution.


John Bates
Curator and Section Head, Life Sciences

Contact Information

The tropics harbor the highest species diversity on the planet.  I am most intrigued by evolution at the tips of the tree of life.  My students and I study genetic structure in tropical birds and other organisms to address how this diversity evolved and how it continues to evolve as climates change and humans continue to alter landscapes.

We study comparative genetic structure and evolution primarily in the Afrotropics, the Neotropics, and the Asian tropics.  I am an ornithologist, but students working with me and my wife Shannon Hackett and other museum curators also have studied amphibians and small mammals (bats and rodents) and more recently internal, external and blood parasites (e.g., Lutz et al. 2015, Block et al. 2015, Patitucci et al. 2016).  Research in the our lab has involved gathering and interpreting genetic data in both phylogeographic and phylogenetic frameworks. Phylogenetic work on Neotropical birds has focused on rates of diversification and comparative biogeography (Tello and Bates 2007, Pantané et al 2009, Patel et al. 2011, Lutz et al. 2013, Dantas et al. 2015).  Phylogeographic work has sought to understand comparative patterns of divergence at level of population and species across different biomes (Bates et al 2003, Bates et al. 2004, Bowie et al. 2006, I. Caballero dissertation research, Block et al. 2015, Winger and Bates 2015, Lawson et al. 2015).  We also have used genetic data to better understand evolutionary patterns in relation to climate change across landscapes (e.g., Carnaval and Bates 2007) that include the Albertine Rift (through our MacArthur Grants, e.g., Voelker et al. 2010, Engel et al. 2014), the Eastern Arc Mountains (Lawson dissertation research, Lawson et al. 2015), the Philippines (T. Roberts and S. Weyandt dissertation research) and South America, particularly the Amazon (Savit dissertation research, Savit and Bates 2015, Figueiredo et al. 2013), and we are entering into the genomic realm focusing initially on Andean (Winger et al. 2015) and Amazonian birds (through our NSF Dimensions of Diversity grant). Shane DuBay is doing his dissertation research in the Himalayas on physiological plasticity in Tarsiger Bush Robins.  Nick Crouch, who I co-advise at U. Illinois, Chicago with Roberta Mason-Gamer, is studying specialization in birds from a modern phylogenetic perspective.  We seek to create a broader understanding of diversification in the tropics from a comparative biogeographic framework (Silva and Bates 2002, Kahindo et al, 2007, Bates et al. 2008, Antonelli et al. 2009).  João Capurucho (U. Illinois, Chicago, co-advised with Mary Ashley)  is studying phlylogeography of Amazonian white sand specialist birds and Natalia Piland (Committee on Evolutionary Biology, U. Chicago) is studying the impact of urbanization on Neotropical birds.  New graduate student Valentina Gomez Bahamon (U. Illinois, Chicago) is also working Boris Igic and me, after doing her Master Degree in her native Colombia on genomics and the evolution of migrating Fork-tailed Flycatchers (Tyrannus savana).  Jacob Cooper (Committee on Evolutionary Biology, U. Chicago) is studying the diversification of birds in Afromonte forests

Josh Engel and I are working up multi-species phylogeographic studies of birds across the Albertine Rift, based the Bird Division's long term research throughout the region.  We are working up similar data sets for Malawian birds.  Our current NSF Dimensions of Diversity grant on the assembly of the Amazonian biota and our NSF grant to survey birds and their parasites across the southern Amazon are generating genomic data for analysis in collaboration with paleoecologists, climatologists, geologists, and remote sensing experts from the U.S. and Brazil.  These large collaborative projects are providing new perspectives on the history of Amazonia.