alison boyer
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I am recent graduate of the Jim Brown Lab in Biology at the University of New Mexico. Generally, my research interests are in macroecology, biogeography, and paleoecology, while my dissertation work focused on the ecology and extinction of birds on Pacific Islands. I am broadly interested in historical and current human impacts on ecosystems, macro-scale patterns of body size evolution, and processes governing biological diversity. Recent projects include:
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My core dissertation work focuses on the ecology and extinction of birds on remote Pacific Islands. Islands can be viewed as replicated evolutionary experiments. On each island, the pre-human faunas are products of independent evolutionary trajectories, which show convergent evolution of body size and other traits among different faunas. Humans did not reach remote islands in the Pacific until very recently, geologically-speaking, and when they did arrive, they initiated sweeping changes, including size-biased extinctions.