Author: Ian Wang

Mike Yuan has been awarded a $2,000 grant from the MVZ’s Louise Kellog Fund, established in 1970 to enhance the MVZ collections. The award will support Mike’s work on morphological evolution in anoles.

Drew Hart has received a grant from Idea Wild to support his epiphyte research in Costa Rica this summer! The grant will be used to purchase a drone that Drew will use to collect epiphytes from the canopy in cloud forests.

Drew Hart has been awarded a Tinker Field Research Grant from the Center for Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley. The grant will support his summer field research in Costa Rica.

Mike Yuan was awarded a Rosemary Grant Research Award for $2,400 from the Society for the Study of Evolution.

Mike Yuan has been awarded a Smithsonian graduate student fellowship for summer 2017. He will work at the National Museum of Natural History with Rayna Bell and Kevin de Queiroz on anole morphological evolution.

Ian has published a new paper on urban landscape genetics in collaboration with Andre Lourenco and Guillermo Velo-Anton from CIBIO (Portugal) and David Alvarez from the University of Oviedo (Spain).  The paper examines the effects of urbanization on demography and genetic isolation in fire salamanders in the historical city of Oviedo, a centuries old city in northern Spain.

Lourenco A., Alvarez D., Wang I.J., and Velo-Anton G. (in press) Trapped within the city: Integrating demography, time since isolation and population-specific traits to assess the genetic effects of urbanization. Molecular Ecology.

Drew Hart has been awarded a $4,600 grant from the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) Emerging Challenges in Tropical Science program for his project on morphological variation in cloud forest epiphytes.  Drew will travel to three OTS field stations in Costa Rica next summer to collect epiphyte specimens for this project and potential followup studies.

Skye Glenn’s undergraduate honors thesis was highlighted in this month’s issue of Breakthroughs, the magazine of the UC Berkeley College of Natural Resources.  Skye’s work examined genetic variation in California newts inhabiting the East Bay parks.

https://nature.berkeley.edu/breakthroughs/undergraduate-research

Mike Yuan has two recent 2016 publications now in print:

Blekhman R, Tang K, Archie EA, Barreiro LB, Johnson ZP, Wilson ME, Kohn J, Yuan ML, Gesquiere L, Grieneisen L, Tung J (2016) Common methods for fecal sample storage in long-term field studies have a minimal impact on gut microbiome profiles. Scientific Reports, 6: 31519. DOI: 10.1038/srep31519

Snyder-Mackler N, Majoros WH, Yuan ML, Shaver AO, Gordon J, Kopp G, Schlebusch S, Wall JD, Alberts SC, Mukherjee S, Zhou X, Tung J (2016) Efficient genome-wide sequencing and low coverage pedigree analysis from non-invasively collected samples. Genetics, 203: 699-714. DOI: 10.1534/genetics.116.187492

Our NSF Dimensions of Biodiversity grant on the Landscape Genomics of an Adaptive Radiation has just been approved! In collaboration with Luke Mahler at the University of Toronto, we’ll be examining genomic and morphological variation at the population level across 12 species of Anolis lizards from the Greater Antilles.