During and After the Glacial Period

The Monday, February 16, OKC Audubon Society meeting’s speaker will be Luis Cueto, Luis is a native of Peru and who has done extensive research on birds in the Andean and lowland regions of South America as well as the arctic.

His talk is entitled “During and after the glacial period.” Pleistocene glacial cycles profoundly shaped the distribution and demographic history of species across both boreal and tropical regions. Here, we investigate how these glacial pulses influenced the demographic trajectories of five species within the boreal bird family Calcariidae, and how repeated cycles of climatic change structured the present-day distribution of a tropical Andean wren confined to isolated mountaintop “islands.”

Luis is a Ph.D. Candidate at the School of Biological Sciences of the University of Oklahoma.  Luis holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from the National University of San Agustín in Arequipa, Peru. He has participated in numerous ornithological expeditions to the Amazon and the tropical Andes of Peru, with the Field Museum of Chicago, the University of Kansas, the University of Oxford, and Louisiana State University, among others. These expeditions gave him the opportunity to complete a fellowship at the Field Museum’s DNA Lab, where he participated in two projects.  After that, Luis worked as the director of ARCAmazon’s new research station on the Las Piedras River in Madre de Dios, one of the most biodiverse areas of the Peruvian Amazon. Later, Luis worked on establishing the molecular biology laboratory at the National University Toribio Rodríguez de Mendoza in Amazonas, northern Peru, where he installed and commissioned the first Illumina NextSeq sequencer in Peru. Following this, Luis entered the doctoral program at the University of Oklahoma and is currently co-advised by Jeremy Ross and Katharine Marske.

Our meetings are held September through June on the third Monday of each month with the exception of January. Meetings begin at 7 p.m. Visitors are always welcome.

Meeting Location:

Our meetings are held at the Will Rogers Garden center, located at the intersection of NW 36th Street and I-44. The Oklahoma City Audubon Society is neither a chapter of, nor affiliated with, the National Audubon Society.