Claudia PhD!
Jorge Soberón's student Claudia Nuñez-Penichet successfully defended her doctoral dissertation on Friday, December 8. Dr. Nuñez-Penichet will begin a postdoctoral research appointment with Bruce Lieberman and Erin Saupe in January. Congratulations to Claudia!
Daniel Romero-Alvarez completed his Ph.D.! His dissertation was entitled Unveiling the zoonotic and environmental potential of leprosy transmission. This work is quite novel, as the disease is currently considered to be transmitted only via human to human contact. Watch the defense on Youtube here!
KUENM on Conservation Prioritization
KUENM student Marlon Cobos led a collaborative effort to speak to how real-world data imbalances transmits into tangible effects on conservation prioritization analyses. A whole bunch of KUENM coauthors participated...
Lab members finish up and move on to neat new things...
This has been a season of turnover in the lab, but turnover in a very nice sense. Fernando Machado-Stredel defended his PhD dissertation successfully, and is going on to a postdoc at the University of New Mexico. Pete Campbell finished up his masters, and is going on to work on the influenza PIPP grant (still based at KU!). Coming up ... Marlon Cobos and Daniel Romero finishing up and going on to neat postdocs as well. Finally, Jacob Cooper has just accepted a tenure-track position at University of Nebraska - Kearney, and departs shortly to start that job. So lots of turnover, and lots of people that we will miss, BUT all going on to neat next steps in their careers. Congratulations to all!
Town peterson at Newton residency
ATP has spent the past 2 weeks at the "Mother's Milk" Creative Residency, a farmhouse in central Kansas that receives visitors for what are termed "creative residencies." This has been key time for ATP to finish up the Benecke book, and advance significantly (>200 historical photos resolved, either by retaking the view or by concluding that the image cannot be retaken) his Kansas landscapes project.
Lab research featured in Science
Lab alumni Rusby Contreras-Diaz and Luis Osorio-Olvera, plus friend and colleague Javier Nori and other colleagues, plus Jorge Soberón and Town Peterson, recently authored a paper in Biological Conservation. They point out that a conservation-purposed data security measure in the platform iNaturalist may be confusing many analyses of those data. The work was featured in a recent news item in the journal Science.
Daniel Romero-Alvarez's hemisphere-wide survey of the leprosy bacterium in armadillos was just published in Emerging Infectious Diseases. Daniel's work is very novel... showing that Mycobacterium leprae actually has a broad distribution. Paper available paper here.
Lesser Prairie-Chicken Opinion Expressed
The Kansas State Senate recently passed a resolution condemning the recent federal government move to list LPCs as threatened or endangered. ATP and Mark Robbins expressed their disdain for the small-mindedness of the senators in an opinion published in the Lawrence Times.
ATP reflections on recent chicken-junglefowl paper in PLoS Genetics
Red Junglefowl represent the wild ancestor of domestic chickens, and ATP has collaborated for the past 3 decades with I. Lehr Brisbin in understanding the process of domestication, and the threats to wild junglefowl from back-hybridization between domestic and wild individuals. The new paper brings a unique genomic perspective to the question, and yields fascinating insights into the advance of domestic genes into wild junglefowl populations. ATP, having a record of publication on this topic, was consulted by the science writer who was reporting on this new set of insights. Here is the report/commentary that resulted from the interview.
CONGRATULATIONS, Dr. ABDU!!!! Yes, Abdu Alkishe finished his PhD, and defended his dissertation successfully on Tuesday last! We are all proud of him to no end, and wish him and his family well in the great postdoc at Virginia Tech!
Nice paper published by former student Uzma Ashraf, on niche conservatism and evolution in olives. Available here.
And another Bunker resurvey site surveyed in early November... this time in Hamilton County. Not ideal conditions, but an important site out in western Kansas.
Another cool Bunker Resurvey Project site visit... This site is in northern Trego County, on the Saline River. The site was visited and studied by Charles Dean Bunker in the early 1900s, and a team of ornithologists and mammalogists from KU Biodiversity Institute just visited the site again, developing new collections to match the old ones, as well as deploying camera traps to detect animals that are harder to find.
The Bunker Resurvey Project is designed to illuminate how Kansas faunas have changed over the past century. The trip ran from 20-25 October 2022.
Chickadee hybrid zone paper now out. A collaborative effort with Collections Manager Mark Robbins, Curator Rob Moyle, and colleague Alana Alexander, documenting that western parts of the hybrid zone are moving more slowly than eastern parts, likely as a consequence of lower levels of realized climate change in the western parts of the region. Paper available here.
11 October 2022: Excited to share a next paper on longer-term dynamics of treelines. The paper is open access: "Linking repeat photography and remote sensing to assess treeline rise with climate warming..." in Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research.
Science Art ... Here is an AI-derived depiction of the title and last sentence of the abstract from our recent paper in Nature Ecology and Evolution, created by Huijie Qiao and Disco Diffusion. Paper available here.
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19-23 September 2022: ATP begins teaching as part of the Curso-Taller Modelado de Nicho Ecológico BUAP-2022, a course on ecological niche modeling being taught by lab alumni Daniel Jiménez-García and Roberta Marques.
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28 September 2022: Lab alumnus Andrés Lira-Noriega will give a talk in the Funk Lecture Series on Biogeography, at 5 pm UTC. Title is 'Forecasting wildlife infectious diseases at global scales.' More information at: https://www.biogeography.org/what-we-offer/webinars/.
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September 2022: ATP and the BI's Mark Holder were just awarded part of a major grant from the National Science Foundation's Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention program. This work will focus on the potential for a future pandemic from an influenza virus yet to evolve. See here for more information on the program.
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2-14 September 2022: ATP escaped to Colorado to get in 2 weeks of field work for his treeline dynamics project. He is working through about 36 sites from which there are photographs taken in the 1800s, that show treeline, and that can be relocated. The work consists of long hikes at high elevations, but results in before-and-after comparisons that reveal how much treelines have shifted over the past century. See example photo at left, which is showing the "crater" of Longs Peak, in Rocky Mountain National Park.
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30 August 2022: The Bunker Resurvey Project received generous support from the Chickadee Checkoff program of the Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks, and Tourism (KDWP). This funding will make possible resurvey work at four riparian sites spanning the state from south to north (Comanche, Clark, Trego, and Cheyenne counties). Work has already begun at several of the sites, and will continue into next summer and early fall.
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August 2022: ATP completed a super-productive, four-day trip in central Kansas to get some of the last Robert Benecke rephotos that he needed (now just 7 left to take, all in Lawrence, Kansas City, and Denver!), but managed also to visit the abandoned Prospect Ranch (Russell County) and to take 28 drone-based rephotos recreating so-called birdseye views of Kansas landscapes, mostly in Clay County. Wonderful windfree days, even if they were super hot. See here for an example.
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August 2022: New graduate student, Eric Ng'eno, here to work with me on questions of disease ecology. Eric is from Kenya, and has been working on the ecology of the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Fascinating work so far, and I am greatly looking forward to working with Eric over coming years.
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18 August 2022: New publication with dear friends in Brazil, at CRIA, in Campinas, who run the speciesLink data portal. Publication summarizes the history of speciesLink initiatives. Available here.
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8 August 2022: New publication with the open access group here at KU, on how and why the Open Access movement has gone astray, with some thoughts about how to fix it. In Ghana Library Journal, and pdf available here.
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2-6 June 2022: Bunker Resurvey Project launches first multitaxon expedition to historical survey sites. A group of eight curators, staff, and students from the Biodiversity Institute are working at a site in southeastern Comanche County, near the abandoned townsite of Aetna. C.D. Bunker worked there in 1911, and the team is back, creating a first set of repeat inventories for the site.
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20 May 2022: Bunker Resurvey Project is awarded a grant from the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks' Chickadee Checkoff fund. This grant will fund studies at four sites in riparian areas across western Kansas, ranging from the Oklahoma border to the Nebraska border, and all surveyed by our BI predecessors in the 1910s.
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23 February 2022: USA-Canada paper published! This KUENM Group publication treats the question of integrating diverse data streams (i.e., old specimens and massive-scale new observational data) to detect and characterize biotic change. We "calibrated" the method across the USA and Canada, and then applied it to the avifauna of Chichén-Itzá, in southeastern Mexico. In each case, we detected and documented interesting changes. See paper here.
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12 January 2022: VIJAY GOES TO GBIF... KUENM graduate Vijay Barve has been selected as a key individual in promoting biodiversity data sharing and use in Asia by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. See announcement.
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9 January 2022: LAB PAPER SUBMITTED... The KUENM group project that shows that temporal turnover of climatic conditions (e.g., between the Last Glacial Maximum and present) represents a significant determinant of island biodiversity, is now finally submitted for publication. Wish us luck!!!
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8 December 2021: PAPER ACCEPTED... At long last, the KUENM group project that is affectionately called "USA-Canada" was accepted for publication in the journal Avian Research. This study assessed the potential to integrate older, specimen-based records of birds with newer, observational records from public sources to illuminate patterns of biotic change. The integration is not easy, but indeed proved feasible, such that the study illuminates fascinating dimensions of change in North America.
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7 December 2021: So proud of ANAÏS VIGNOLES: an amazing archeologist and “ancient human ecologist.” It was a pleasure to host her in the lab, for too short of a time, back before the pandemic started. It was also wonderful to see her dissertation defense yesterday, which she presented brilliantly.
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2 December 2021: BURROWING FROG NICHE paper is OUT! At very long last, an impressive paper comes out led by Alondra Encarnacion, guided by Octavio Rojas-Soto, showing how behavioral shifts in Smilisca frogs can expand geographic potential of a lineage. Available here.
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15 November 2021: FIRST LAB VISITOR POST-PANDEMIC! Cavin Rowayi, a young biologist from Botswana, is visiting the Lab to explore research interests, as well as the possibility of staying on to study toward his masters degree. Cavin is working on an analysis of how climate change is likely to affect the iconic baobab tree that is distributed across the continent of Africa.
