Chelsea Berns

I am an NSF Predoctoral Fellow in the third year of my Ph.D. in the Adams lab. I am interested in morphological variation as it relates to contemporary microevolution, scaling up to patterns of macroevolution and adaptive radiation. Specifically, I am using hummingbird bill morphology to examine between and within species morphological variation in order to quantify whether evolutionary rates of morphological change are associated with rates of speciation across sub-lineages of hummingbirds and also to test the prediction that hummingbirds represent an adaptive radiation.

 

 

 

Publications
1. Adams, D.C., C.M. Berns, K.H. Kozak, and J.J. Wiens. 2009. Are rates of species diversification correlated with rates of morphological evolution? Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B. 276:2729-2738.

2. C.M. Berns and D.C. Adams. 2009. Differential bill shape and sexual shape dimorphism between two temperate species of hummingbirds: Archilochus alexandri and Archilochus colubris. The Auk. (submitted).