Welcome to the Guralnick Lab homepage. The lab's broad research
interest is how animal species respond to past and present
environmental changes. The approaches we use to study these
questions are varied and include direct inference through examination
of fossil and modern species, as well as indirect inference using
molecular phylogenetic, ecological niche modeling, and morphometrics
approaches. We examine multiple aspects of response - including
distributional, molecular, morphological and functional. Because so
much of the work in lab uses primary species and population occurrence
data (when and where species and populations occur) available from
natural history collections, we are very involved in ecological and
biodiversity informatics initiatives to increase the quality, availability
and utility of such datasets at the global scale. Our particular informatics
interest is building online Geographic Information Systems so that anyone
may access, visualize and analyze legacy and current biodiversity
and environmental data. I primarily work on gastropod and
bivalve molluscs but students work on a variety of organisms including
mammals, viruses and ferns.
