Courses

Lab Members

Thomas Tietze, Post-doctoral fellow

Jason Weir, Post-doctoral fellow

Natasha Bloch, Graduate student

Udayan Borthakur, Visiting graduate student

Elizabeth Scordato, Graduate student

David Wheatcroft, Graduate student

Research

For a general overview of the research in my lab, see the departmental website. I have just completed a book on bird speciation. The current focus of my research is on the determinants of bird species diversity along the Himalayas, notably the question of why there are twice as many species in the eastern Himalayas as the west. This work is being done in collaboration with Dhananjai Mohan (email) and Pratap Singh (email) at the Wildlife Institute of India, as well as my long term (23 years!) collaborator Nitin Jamdar and his wife Kartika (email) . We are conducting extensive field studies of the ecology, abundance, elevational, and latitudinal distributions of passerine birds. We are working in the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, West Bengal, Himachal Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, mostly in the months April-July. Together with Bettina Harr of the Max Planck Institue in Ploen, Germany, we are generating mitochondrial DNA based phylogenies. The combination of phylogenetic and ecological work will be used to distinguish so-called ecological and historical explanations for the gradient in species diversity. Graduate students in the lab are working on other related projects, see their own websites.

Selected publications (full list in pdf format)

FOR SUPPLEMENTS TO PUBLISHED PAPERS PLEASE GO HERE

1. Price, T. D., A. Qvarnström, and D. E. Irwin. (2003) The role of phenotypic plasticity in driving genetic evolution. Proceedings of the Royal Society, B 270:1433-1440. pdf
2. Price, T., J. Zee, K. Jamdar and N. Jamdar (2003) Bird species diversity along the Himalayas: a comparison of Himachal Pradesh with Kashmir. J. Bombay Nat. Hist. Soc. 100: 394-409 pdf
3. Irwin, D. E., S. Bensch, J. H. Irwin and T. Price. (2005) Speciation by distance in a ring species. Science 307:414-415.pdf
4. Johansson, U. S., P. Alström, U. Olsson, P. Ericson, P. Lundberg and T. D. Price. (2007) Build-up of the Himalayan avifauna through immigration: a biogeographical analysis of the Phylloscopus and Seicercus warblers. Evolution 61: 324-333 pdf
5. Phillimore, A. B., and T. D. Price (2008) Density-dependent cladogenesis in birds. PLOS Biology. 6: e71 pdf

Courses

Undergraduate class Environmental Ecology (BIOS13107). Winter 2009. Syllabus

Graduate class EVOL 31501: The Influence of History on Ecological Communities Winter 2009. Wednesdays 1-2.30 in the Lillie Room. First meeting on January 7th.
At least in terrestrial systems on continents, the number of species in small grids (typically on the scale of 1 degree, or about 100 x100 km.) is strongly correlated with productivity (essentially rainfall x temperature). This has been shown to be true for as diverse systems as plants and birds. But is this correlation causal? In this class we will use readings from the primary literature to evaluate the causal hypothesis, and the major alternative, which is that the correlation arises because productive environments are ancient, and have been undisturbed (at temporal scales ranging from annual cycles, through glaciations).

Graduate class Ecological Genetics. Offered in alternate years, to be offered Fall 2009. Most recent syllabus