We have big news: we're recruiting! We recently received funding from the National Science Foundation (US) and we're now looking for a PhD student to join our project. Please see the letter from Allison below:
Dai Shizuka and I are recruiting a graduate student to start in Fall 2024 on our NSF funded project on the ecogeography of social behavior in Australian birds. The student would be joining Dai’s lab at University of Nebraska-Lincoln but would be doing fieldwork with me (PI of the grant and Research Assistant Professor associated with the Shizuka Lab) on fairywrens. The deadline for applications to UNL is December 1st, but we highly encourage the student to contact us as soon as possible so we can have a chance to correspond and potentially meet via Zoom.
The student would be engaged in studies of avian social behavior along an ecological gradient across south-eastern Australia, with the potential to additionally work on mixed-species flock studies and long-term field studies at Brookfield Conservation Park, SA. Below we’ve included a brief description of the primary intended research. Please encourage any students to email both myself (ajohnson165@unl.edu) and Dr. Shizuka (dshizuka2@unl.edu) as I’m currently in the field and may have limited ability to respond quickly.
Project Overview:
This project develops an ecogeographic approach to understand the processes that generate both within- and across-species variation in structure of cooperative social groups across environmental gradients. We suggest that integrating ecogeographic patterns across two levels of biological organization, within and across species, will provide new information about how cooperative groups evolve. Such an approach can simultaneously address whether social systems respond to environmental gradients and why species may respond differently from one another. We will accomplish this through three aims: 1) develop a theoretical framework for understanding how environmental effects on social dynamics may generate variation in group structure across environmental gradients, 2) use a cross-continental citizen science dataset on Australian fairywrens (Aves, Maluridae) to examine ecogeographic patterns in social group size across all species and investigate how factors such as urbanization or interacting climate variables alter environment-group size relationships, and 3) conduct observational and experimental studies in two fairywren species to explicitly link disparate patterns of variation to changes in fitness and behavior. The broader impacts activities include a major citizen science platform deployed in collaboration with eBird, and professionally developed high-impact interdisciplinary lesson plans targeting middle school students.
Sincerely
Allison Johnson
