Who: I was born and raised in the UK, attending Oxford University and Imperial College London. I came to Utah purely to join the Şekercioğlu Lab, with little knowledge of Utah. It turns out that Utah is an awesome place to live and I fill my free time with hiking, camping, skiing, and birding.
My scientific interests: I am an ornithologist focused on biodiversity and conservation. I am fascinated by how diversity is created and maintained, and concerned by how it is destroyed.
Academic goals: I aim to understand how anthropogenic changes imperil bird diversity in the tropics. In particular, I want to research how eco-evolutionary differences between birds affect their responses to climate change. Following my PhD I will seek a postdoc where I can leverage large datasets to research global drivers of biodiversity and diversity loss.
Career goals: After a couple of postdocs I would love to start my own lab. By then, I am unsure whether my research will be more theoretical or more conservation-based.
Global warming is predicted to result in the upslope shift of bird populations in montane habitats. Here we report on a resurvey of an understory bird community along an elevational gradient in the Usambara Mountains in northeast Tanzania that was originally surveyed between 1979 and 1981. We resurveyed seven sites that ranged in elevation from 360 m to 2110 m. We calculated differences in midpoint elevation and upper and lower range limits for 29 species between the two time periods and corrected for possible changes over time in elevational range of bird species due to chance alone. Between 1980 and 2019, we documented an average upslope shift across all understory bird species of 93 m. Of the 29 focal species, 19 shifted upslope, eight downslope and two did not change. Upslope shifts in species were driven largely by contracting lower range limits which moved upslope on average across species by 142 m, while upper range limits shifted upslope on average by 73 m. Community composition of understory bird species also shifted over time with current communities resembling communities found historically at lower elevations. We believe that habitat fragmentation in combination with limited gap-crossing ability of many tropical understory bird species may be contributing factors to the asymmetrical shift in the upper and lower range limits over time.