讲座题目：An ecological approach to avian speciation and biodiversity genomics
主讲人：Matthew J. Miller Research Assistant Professor
主持人：张健 教授
开始时间：12月29日 晚上20:00
讲座地址：ZOOM （链接：Please click the link below to join the webinar:https://psu.zoom.us/j/94307438919?pwd=d0JrdzY4WnNMQnZUVUpqQU55dk4rdz09； Passcode: 720398）
报告人简介：
Matthew J. Miller is a research assistant professor of Pennsylvania State University. He received a PhD in biological sciences from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2008. His research interests are avian ecology, avian genomics and evolutionary biology.
报告内容简介： My talk will have two sections. The first focuses on an "ecological approach to understanding avian speciation". The theory of avian speciation in the Neotropics has largely focused on "rocks, rivers, and refugia". This approach presumes that birds' ecological plays a minor role in explaining patterns of bird diversity in what is the world's greatest avian biodiversity hotspot, and ignores a century's worth of work in synecology. Instead, my research program demonstrates how ecological differences between bird guilds result in local demographic patterns that "scale up" across time and space, resulting in distinct patterns of speciation. Rather than a binary space, we now understand speciation to be a continuum, and I explore how my findings across bird guilds can be used to test the "mitonuclear ecology" speciation hypothesis. The second section of my talk explores using molecular tools to explore macroecological questions. I demonstrate the utility of using DNA markers to understand the role of wild birds in the life-cycle of Neotropical ticks and the role of wild birds in transmitting tick-borne pathogens. Following, I show how these tools can be scaled up to ask questions about continental-scale patterns of species distribution. Finally, I present an ambitious plan to use these tools to revolutionize the eco-surveillance of mosquito-borne viruses in the wild, with the goal of early detection to avoid major outbreaks.
