Dr. Guralnick will present a talk that bridges from informatics approaches and creating large-scale data repositories for trait information to the use of those resources to ask ecological and evolutionary questions at new scales. He focuses on phenology and phenotype, showing how citizen science data can be used to understand trophic asynchrony between green-up in plants and bird arrival times, and classic questions about body size variation in relation to climate, but at the scale of hundreds of species. This collaborative work shows the power of such approaches.
Dr. Guralnick works at the intersection of informatics and biodiversity science. His career has been spent working in natural history museums, transitioning from a more traditional Curator role into a role at the Florida Museum of Natural History where he focuses more on data science approaches. While he won’t talk about his more evolutionary focused efforts here, he comes from a systematics background and often utilizes phylogenetic approaches in his work.