Fieldwork is an important part of my work as an ornithologist and evolutionary biologist. My research relies on museum specimens collected from many localities over many years, and I am committed to contributing to those resources by collecting birds with high-quality genetic material & detailed data, depositing those resources as vouchers in museum collections, and making the data publicly available through online repositories. I have surveyed bird communities in Arizona, California, Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and Brazil, and have prepared hundreds of museum specimens from birds collected and salvaged from all over the world.
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Emilie Snethlage ExpeditionIn 2019, I had the privilege of participating in month-long survey of the avifauna of the Juruá river, a major tributary of the Amazon river in western Amazonas state, Brazil. Led by an international team of women scientists from the U.S. and Brazil, we collected the first high-quality genetic material and modern specimens of birds from this region since the 1930s, which are deposited in the LSU Museum of Natural Science and the Museu de Zoologia da Universidade de São Paulo. The expedition was named in honor of Emilie Snethlage, the first woman to lead a scientific institution in South America, who was a pioneering field ornithologist and expert on Amazonian birds. We published the findings of our survey in Journal of Ornithology (Del Rio...Salter et al., 2021), and the expedition is the subject of a forth-coming documentary. We're hoping to return to the Juruá in 2024 - stay tuned!
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