My talk will summarize our efforts to understand the evolutionary factors underlying the extraordinary richness of Neotropical bird species. I will present data collected at multiple taxonomic scales, including phylogenomic analyses of large bird radiations and fine-scale population genetic analyses of single species. These data highlight the importance of the physical landscape in driving speciation, but, contrary to much biogeographic theory, provide scant evidence that specific events in Earth history have influenced speciation in a unified fashion. Instead, the relative timing of speciation events within lineages is largely idiosyncratic and influenced primarily by natural history characteristics of the species, such as dispersal ability.

View YouTube video of seminar: https://youtu.be/V55JU1ZnLHM