Chelsea Berns

I am an NSF Predoctoral Fellow in the fifth 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.

Link to CV

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Publications
4. Berns, C.M. and D.C. Adams. 2012. Becoming different but staying alike: patterns of sexual size and shape dimorphism in hummingbirds. Evolutionary Biology (accepted).

3. Worthington, A.M., C.M. Berns, and J.G. Swallow. 2012. Size matters, but so does shape: Quantifying complex shape changes in a sexually selected trait in stalk-eyed flies (Diptera:Diosidae). Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. 106: 104-113.2.

2. Berns, C.M. and D.C. Adams. 2010. Bill shape and sexual shape dimorphism between two species of temperature hummingbirds: Archilochus alexandri (black-chinned hummingbirds) and Archilochus colubris (ruby-throated hummingbirds). The Auk. 127:626-635.

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.