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GEE Seminar - Prof Adam Leaché, University of Washington
27 October 2021, 4:00 pm–5:00 pm
Title: 'Comparative species delimitation: examples with lizards'
Event Information
Open to
- UCL staff | UCL students | UCL alumni
Availability
- Yes
Organiser
-
Amy Godfrey
Location
-
Zoom---
Academic Host: Ziheng Yang
Abstract: Species are a fundamental unit of diversity in the natural world. Therefore, accurately documenting species diversity has important implications in life sciences, habitat management, and conservation. Yet, despite the importance of species in understanding biodiversity, it is often difficult to identify unambiguous species boundaries in many taxonomic groups. Lizards are one such example of a taxonomic group with genetically differentiated populations that often look very similar. What appears to be one lizard species is often a species group of several possible lizard species. We are exploring the utility of comparative species delimitation to determine species boundaries across the North American lizard fauna. Doing so will connect our scientific understandings of how species form to the practice of naming species.
About the Speaker
Prof Adam Leaché
Principal Investigator at University of Washington
Research in the Leache Lab focuses on phylogenetics, systematics, phylogeography, and species delimitation. We study natural populations, and we conduct fieldwork to collect specimens for our research. Most of us study amphibians and reptiles, but we also have on-going projects focused on birds and mammals. We maintain an active research lab with a mix of graduate students, undergraduate students, and postdoctoral researchers in the Department of Biology and at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture(link is external).
We use a wide variety of new genomic tools in our research, including SNPs for phylogeography and species delimitation and targeted sequence capture for phylogenomics. We are also interested in phylogenetic methods, and we conduct computer simulations to study statistical aspects of species tree inference and species delimitation.
More about Prof Adam Leaché