Brittany S. Barker

Ph.D. Candidate

Department of Biology, University of New Mexico

E-mail: barkerbr@unm.edu Phone: (505) 205-4251; FAX: (505) 277-0304

At The Baths in Virgin Gorda, BVI.

Contact me

Curriculum Vitae

Research Interests

Phylogeography and landscape genetics of terrestrial vertebrates

Evolution, conservation biology and biogeography of tropical island communities

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and ecological niche modeling

Current Position

Ph.D. student, Department of Biology, The University of New Mexico, USA. Co-advised by Profs. Joe Cook and Bob Waide.

Teaching Assistant for BIOL 386L, General Vertebrate Zoology laboratory. * CLICK HERE for my lab course materials.

Past Positions

NSF GK-12 Fellow in 7^th grade Life Sciences at Belen Middle School, Belen, New Mexico

* CLICK HERE for a subset of my lesson plans designed for 7^th and 8^th grade students

Research Assistant, Robert B. Waide, University of New Mexico

Laboratory Technician, Thomas B. Smith, University of California, Los Angeles

Wildlife Biologist, Swaim Biological Consulting, Livermore, California

Laboratory Technician and Field Assistant, Stevan J. Arnold, Oregon State University, Corvallis

Other Links

NSF GK-12 Program at UNM

Cook Molecular Ecology and Evolution Lab, UNM, USA

Species Distribution Modeling Methods for Conservation Biologists

UNM Department of Biology

LTER Luquillo Experimental Forest, Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico GAP Analysis Project

Museum of Southwestern Biology, UNM, USA

Current Research

The ecological requirements of species largely determine what geologic, climatic and environmental factors constitute barriers to gene flow, and ultimately play a role in divergence. There is remarkably little known, however, about the interplay of historical events and ecological requirements driving intra-specific diversification within tropical island systems. I am investigating how populations of the codistributed but ecologically unique frog species, the Mountain coquí (Eleutherodactylus portoricensis) and the Red-eyed coquí (E. antillensis), have diverged in response to a series of shared climatic and geologic events on the Puerto Rican Bank in the Caribbean. I am testing explicit models of population divergence, based on current and historical ecological niche models of this tropical island system, using coalescent and population genetic analyses of multiple DNA loci.