Use of Population Genetics for Understanding Avian Movement by Paige Byerly
Thursday, February 11 2021
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Location: Online via Zoom and Facebook Live. Zoom requires advance registration (link below). Facebook Live does not.
https://audubon.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUrdeCtrDsvG9y5VXgIUg3FVW6jVsj...
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Description: Understanding the movement of individuals during both the breeding and non-breeding seasons can be important for guiding conservation efforts for threatened and endangered wildlife populations. For birds, such movement information can often be obtained through long-term banding efforts and, increasingly, tracking via technology like satellite tags and geolocators. However, these hands-on approaches aren't equally possible for all species and populations, especially in areas of lower research effort like the global tropics. Population genetics can help fill in gaps of our understanding of relatedness of wildlife populations, which can help guide inferences about movement between these populations. Increasingly, we can also obtain DNA from museum specimens to understand changes in movement over longer time-scales.
In her presentation, Paige Byerly will talk about the application of these types of genetic approaches for understanding the history and relatedness of Roseate Terns, an endangered seabird species. In North America, Roseate Terns nest in New England, Florida, and the Caribbean. They can be challenging to study, and because of this we have a poor understanding of many aspects of their life history. Byerly and collaborators used genetic analyses to test the hypothesis that populations in North America do not exchange breeding individuals, which would be unusual for a species with such high movement potential. They also used DNA from museum specimens to investigate if human activities in the 20th century changed their historical movement patterns. Their results highlight how genetics can be used to inform conservation policy, and can be an important tool for wildlife conservation!
Contact the event organizers: Volunteer & Continuing Education Committee