Quinnipiac Chapter of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society
Seminar Series presents
Dr. Scott Davies
Associate Professor of Biology, Quinnipiac
University
“Coping
with environmental change:
Reproductive
adjustments of songbirds to urban living”
Monday, April 1 at 2:00 PM in Student Center 119
Urbanization profoundly
alters the environment and forces urban organisms to adjust to the new
conditions. Since urban areas are one of the most rapidly expanding habitat
types worldwide, the potential impact of urbanization on biodiversity is
substantial. There is, therefore, an urgent need to understand the mechanisms
responsible for adjustment to these new habitats.
Like most wild animals,
birds have distinct seasonal breeding periods that are synchronized with
optimal environmental conditions to maximize reproductive success. Hence, it
may be advantageous for urban birds to adjust the timing of reproductive
activity to local environmental conditions. This presentation will describe how
wild songbirds adjust their reproductive activity to live in urban areas and
explore the mechanisms responsible for these adjustments.
Dr. Scott Davies is
originally from the United Kingdom and got his undergraduate and master’s
degrees from the University of Wales, Bangor. He moved to the USA to complete
his PhD at Arizona State University studying the reproductive endocrinology of
urban birds. He then continued his work on the physiology of urban living as a
postdoctoral researcher at Virginia Tech and the University of Nevada, Reno. He has been at Quinnipiac since 2017.
