FREE Webinar about Boulder County Chickadees - Today at 1PM

[Lindsey Broadhead]

Hello Colorado birders, 

Today (Sunday May 23rd) Wild Bear Nature Center is hosting a free webinar over Zoom about the latest research in chickadee genetics with guest speaker, CU PhD student Kathryn Grabenstein. The talk starts at 1:00 PM and will be approximately 45 minutes long with a 15 minute Q&A. Here is the link to register!

About Kathryn:

Kathryn is currently an NSF Predoctoral fellow and PhD Candidate at CU Boulder working with Dr. Scott Taylor in the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Department.

She studies how humans alter the way closely-related species interact and the evolutionary consequences of those behavioral shifts. Specifically, she explores how when humans build cities, they can change how species that live there interact, and in some cases, cause them to interbreed and produce hybrids. This hybridization in human-altered environments highlights the power of habitat disturbances to break well-established species barriers. However, few studies have experimentally assessed how disturbances drive hybridization.

Combining genomics and field studies, Kathryn investigates how disturbance modifies interactions between chickadees to promote hybridization. Her work focuses on establishing a long-term study, the Boulder Chickadee Study, as an experimental framework and community science network to explore basic natural histories of Colorado chickadees, and to improve our understanding of how humans drive evolutionary trajectories.

Thanks everyone! Hope you can join us virtually this afternoon!

Best,

--

Lindsey Broadhead (she/her)

Visitor Services/Marketing Manager

Wild Bear Nature Center

20 Lakeview Drive Unit 106 | PO Box 3017 | Nederland, CO 80466
303-258-0495
www.wildbear.org
Book an outreach program today!
http://wildbear.org/outreach-programs/