Specific biological questions currently under study (with collaborators) are diverse, and include:|- studying the impacts of a novel bacterial disease on the dynamics of a naive host species,|- examining phylogenetic constraints on ecological characteristics of North American parulid warblers,|- developing approaches to using data mining tools to identify potential environmental correlates of bird species` presence and relative abundance, and|- looking for long-term changes in migratory behavior of a suite of European songbirds.|Broadly speaking, all of these research questions have the objective of identifying the constraints that determine where species of birds do and do not live, which is of interest both from an pure research perspective, but also for conservation and management reasons.