Our research uses movement ecology as a framework to understand how individuals and populations respond to changes in their environment in order to project how future change may alter a population’s dynamics and evolutionary trajectory. ​

Breaking News

  • Huge congrats to Jenny Linscott on winning the inaugural Wesley Lanyon Award from the American Ornithological Society for her paper, "Beyond refueling: Investigating the diversity of functions of migratory stopover events" in Ornithological Applications. Stay tuned for much more from Jenny in the coming years about Hudsonian Godwits and their migratory behavior. 
  • Phenotypic flexibility--the ability to repeatedly alter the value of a trait--is key for organisms to be able to respond to changes in their environment over the course of their lives. Little, though, is known about how much species may vary across their range in their levels of flexibility. In lab collaborator Maria Stager's new paper in Nature Communications, we show that, across their range, Dark-eyed Junco populations differ in their flexibility, with individuals from more variable thermal regions exhibiting greater change in their thermogenic capacity in response to temperature cues than birds from less variable climates. Read more in Maria's blog post!
  • Maina Handmaker, along with colleagues at the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources and Cornell Lab of Ornithology, has discovered that nearly half of the Atlantic Coast population of Whimbrel--20,000 birds--roost each night on tiny Deveaux Bank, SC during northward migration. Our findings are out today in Wader Study and also in a short film made by the Conservation Media Center at the Cornell Lab, as well as an essay in the New York Times. We're hoping that this has huge conservation implications!
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senner at mailbox.sc.edu
Department of Biological Sciences
University of South Carolina​
Coker Life Sciences 406
Columbia, South Carolina, U.S.A.