The Anderson Lab

Recent Lab News:

• Rob elected as a 2023 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). This is a distinguished lifetime honor within of the scientific community. This is a testament to all of the amazing past and ongoing work done by Rob and students in the Anderson Lab.

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• Andrew Gaier has been selected by the Division of Science at CCNY to receive a Bernard B. Levine Graduate Fellowship in Science and Mathematics.

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• Rob Anderson is coauthored on a new paper in Ecography entitled "Top ten hazards to avoid when modeling species distributions: a
  didactic guide of assumptions, problems, and recommendations"

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• The lab welcomes back collaborator Lazaro Guevera for a week of research on the effects of climate change and landscape connectivity on Mexican shrews!

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• The Anderson Lab is excited to welcome Andrew Gaier to the lab as a new doctoral student!

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• August witnessed the successful defense of Erica Johnson's doctoral dissertation, "Determining the Influence of Abiotic and Biotic Predictors on Ecological Niche Models." Her dedication and academic prowess shine through in this accomplishment.

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• Gonzalo has added another achievement to his list by publishing the first chapter of his research in Ecological Informatics. The chapter, titled "Predicting Potential Range Shifts Using Climatic Time Series and Niche Models: A Neotropical montane shrew's case," is a testament to his contributions to the field. More information here​.

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• July brought forth a moment of accomplishment as Bethany A. Johnson effectively defended her Master of Science dissertation. Her work, titled "A 'Neighborhood' Approach for Using Remotely Sensed Data to Post-Process Species Distribution Models for Conservation Assessments," showcases her dedication and expertise.

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• Gonzalo E. Pinilla-Buitrago achieved a significant milestone as he successfully defended his doctoral dissertation titled "Expanding the Role of the Temporal Dimension in Ecological Niche Models: A Study on Mexican Montane Small Mammals."

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• Bethany Johnson received the Professor Martin Sacks/Sylvia F. Rubin Award goes to the graduating senior or Master's student at CCNY demonstrating the greatest proficiency in research in Environmental Science.

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• Rebecca Rowe gave the seminar entitled "Ecological responses to a century of change: climate, land use, and the small mammals of the Great Basin." during the CCNY Biology Seminar. More information about her research here.

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• Jamie Kass & Gonzalo E. Pinilla-Buitrago contributed to Nature Ecology & Evolution publication. A correspondence letter highlights the need for better incentives to reward academic software development. More information here​.

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• Robert P. Anderson was recognized as one of three City College Faculty members as Highly Cited Researchers. The latest edition of Web of Science’s annual Highly Cited Researchers list was published in November. See a press note from the Research and Innovation at City College electronic magazine (the RICC) here for more information.

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• Jamie Kass, Gonzalo Pinilla-Buitrago, Andrea Paz, Bethany Johnson, Valentina Grisales-Betancour, Sarah Meenan, Mary Blair, Robert Anderson, and other collaborators publish the second version of #WallaceEcoMod in Ecography. See the early view paper here.

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• Bethany Johnson, Jamie Kass and Gonzalo Pinilla-Buitrago were coauthors on a paper presenting the new R package changeRangeR (manuscript lead by Peter J. Galante and Mary Blair at the American Museum of Natural History), which allows obtaining reproducible biodiversity change metrics from species distribution estimates. Access the paper here.

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• Erica Johnson is one of the ten applicants accepted into the 2023 NYS Assembly Graduate Intern Program. This program provides interns the opportunity to serve as full-time staff during legislative session, assisting in policy analysis, legislative research, communications, and constituent services. More info here.
   

• Rob Anderson publishes a paper in Conservation Biology presenting a framework (and research agenda) for calculating unbiased estimates of Area of Occupancy (AOO) for IUCN Red List assessments. See the early view paper here.
   

• Bethany Johnson wins poster prize among graduate students worldwide at International Biogeography Conference for her work on using models of species distributions for conservation assessments. See more here.
   

• Rob Anderson and Gonzalo Pinilla were coauthors on paper presenting the new R package maskRangeR to estimate species current geographic distributions. The result of a collaboration with scientists at the American Museum of Natural History, Instituto Humboldt (Bogotá), and other institutions, it includes generalized code to implement approaches pioneered by lab alumni Maria Gavrutenko, Beth Gerstner, and Jamie Kass when they were students here. Access the early view article here.
   

• Jamie Kass and Rob Anderson collaborated with visiting scholar Javier Morente-Lopez and others on a paper published in Global Change Biology linking correlative niche models and experimental approaches to studying adaptation. Common-garden experiments found expected patterns of genetically determined changes in flowering phenology for populations of an alpine plant inhabiting stressful environments on the edge of its range in Spain. Access the early view article here.
   

• Gonzalo E. Pinilla Buitrago was granted with Dissertation Fellowship award CUNY Graduate Center. This award for the academic year 2022-2023 will allow him to continue writing his dissertation.
   

• Paper published in Biodiversity Informatics describing ENM2020, a free online course that produced comprehensive archived material on modeling species niches and distributions. Robert Anderson and Gonzalo Pinilla contributed to the course and paper. Access full article here.
   

• The Anderson lab is excited to welcome Bethany Johnson as a master's student. Bethany first joined the lab as an undergraduate student in 2019 and conducted her Honors Thesis on improving IUCN Red List assessments for forest-dwelling rodents by combining ecological niche modeling with remotely sensed vegetation data. She joined the City College of New York's Biology master's program in Fall 2021 and will be continuing her graduate research in the Anderson Lab.
   

• On September 30, 2021, Gonzalo Pinilla Buitrago gave a Wallace webinar as part of the Colombian Information System training series on Biodiversity (SIB Colombia). You can find the webinar video on YouTube.
   

• In September 2020, Jamie Kass and other Anderson lab members published an article highlighting new functions and features of the ENMeval 2.0 R package. Access the full article here.
   

• On August 17, 2021, Erica Johnson and Andrea Paz Velez will gave a Wallace webinar as part of NASA's Applied Remote Sensing Training Program (ARSET) series on species distribution models. During this 1-hour session, they provided an overview of the Wallace app as well as a live demo of version 1. Additionally, they highlighted new features and functions in Wallace's upcoming versions 2 and 3. You may find the webinar video and presentation materials by visiting the ARSET SDM series website. 
   

• The Anderson Lab in coordination with the Bridging Biodiversity & Conservation Science Program at the University of Arizona hosted a webinar series on sky island biogeography and conservation. This series aimed to highlight research conducted in sky island systems in the US and Mexico, and provide a space for discussion between academic researchers and conservation practitioners. Webinar sessions were scheduled for April 16, 23, and 30th from 2-4 pm Additional information and presentation materials may be found on the event's English and Spanish websites.
   

• Robert Anderson presented his work using environmental history and species traits to predict sky island biodiversity in Neotropical Mountains at a virtual event hosted by the Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Morelos CIByC. The talk will be in Spanish and is scheduled for on April 14, 2PM (EDT). More info here.
   

• A new version of Wallace is now available on CRAN. Wallace v.1.0.6.3 provides options to turn clamping on/off when using the maxent.jar modeling module. This option was previously only available for the maxnet package.
   

• In November 2020 Gonzalo Pinilla-Buitrago talked about Wallace in two ecological modelling courses in Colombian universities (Universidad de Pamplona and Universidad Militar Nueva Granada).

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• In September 2020 CCNY graduate students participated in the Humboldt Day celebration by making Science Communication videos. Lab member, Gonzalo Pinilla-Buitrago participated with the video “Rodents in the sky-with-island. See YouTube video here.
   

• In October 2020, lab members participated in a virtual workshop to gain feedback on the development version of Wallace software and extensions of it for conservation biology. The workshop was led by Dr. Mary Blair at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Dr. Elkin Noguera of the Instituto Humboldt in Bogota Colombia. Via a NASA grant to Dr. Blair, this project is developing new tools for estimating species geographic ranges and quantifying indicators of biodiversity change, supporting the goals of the international Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO-BON). 
   

• Robert Anderson et al. (2020) published a new paper in Frontiers of Biogeography. "Optimizing biodiversity informatics to improve information flow, data quality, and utility for science and society". Access the full text here.
   

• In July 2020, the Anderson lab began a new NSF biogeography project, studying colonization and extinction for mammals of Mexican 'sky islands' based on environmental history and species traits. We are applying the Constraint-based model of Dynamic Island Biogeography (C-DIB) to predict and then test community composition on isolated patches of montane forests. Our collaborators include J. Robert Burger, Lazaro Guevara, Ella Vazquez-Dominguez, and Elizabeth Arellano.
   

• Camilo Sanín and Robert Anderson published a new paper in The American Naturalist. "A framework for simultaneous tests of abiotic, biotic, and historical drivers of species distributions: empirical tests for North American wood-warblers based on climate and pollen". PDF
   

• There is new version of Wallace on CRAN and Github (v1.0.6). Wallace now has two options for running Maxent: maxnet (default) and maxent.jar. The exciting thing: no more rJava dependency". See on CRAN.
   

• Rob Anderson gives Wallace webinar in Spanish for Modelado de Distribuciones Potenciales series: ​"El software Wallace para modelar nichos y distribuciones: Un coche con motor R, volante de ratón y cerebro de humano." Broadcast from the City College of New York, City University of New York. Watch on YouTube.
   

• Jamie Kass hosts Wallace webinar including tutorial and live demonstration: "WALLACE: A flexible platform for reproducible modeling of species niches and distributions built for community expansion." Broadcast from the City College of New York, City University of New York. Watch on YouTube.
   

• Gonzalo Pinilla-Buitrago publishes his master's work on Mexican biogeography. "Areas of endemism persist through time: A palaeoclimatic analysis in the Mexican Transition Zone" by Pinilla-Buitrago et al. is published in the May 2018 issue of Journal of Biogeography. PDF
   

• Editor's Choice: Peter Galante et al. explore the challenges of modeling niches and distributions for data-poor species. "The challenge of modeling niches and distributions for data-poor species: a comprehensive approach to model complexity" by Galante et al. is Editor's Choice in the May 2018 issue of Ecography. PDF
   

• Cover! Beth Gerstner et al. revise distributional estimates for a recently discovered carnivoran. "Revised distributional estimates for the recently discovered olinguito (Bassaricyon neblina), with comments on natural and taxonomic history" by Gerstner et al. is featured on the cover of the April 2018 issue of Journal of Mammalogy. PDF
   

• Jamie Kass et al. release and document new biodiveristy software Wallace. "Walace: a flexible platform for reproducible modeling of species niches and distributions built for community expansion" by Kass et al. is published in the April 2018 issue of Methods in Ecology and Evolution. PDF
   

• Lázaro Guevara et al. demonstrate the importance of assessing variation among GCMs when reconstructing geographic distributions. "Variation among Global Circulation Models for reconstructions of geographic distributions at the Last Glacial Maximum: relevance for phylogeography" by Guevara et al. is published in the January-April 2018 issue of Ecosystemas. PDF
   

• Lázaro Guevara et al. illustrate recommendations for estimating species range shifts in Global Change Biology. "Toward ecologically realistic predictions of species distributions: A cross-time example from tropical montane cloud forests" by Guevara et al. is published in the April 2018 issue of Global Change Biology. PDF
   

• In August 2017, the lab commenced a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to expand the Wallace biodiversity software (“ABI Innovation: Wallace: a flexible platform for reproducible modeling of species niches and distributions built for community expansion”). In collaboration with Dr. Cory Merow (Yale University) and Dr. Matthew Aiello-Lammens (Pace University), the grant is funded by the Advances in Biological Informatics program, Division of Biological Infrastructure.
   

• "When and how should biotic interactions be considered in models of species niches and distributions?" by R. P. Anderson is published in Journal of Biogeography. PDF
   

• "A single-algorithm ensemble approach to estimating suitability and uncertainty: cross-time projections for four Malagasy tenrecs" by Boria et al. is published in Diversity and Distributions. PDF
   

• "Opening the black box: an open–source release of Maxent" by Phillips et al. is published in Ecography. PDF
   

• In August 2016, the lab began a one-year NSF EAGER grant “Making code-based analyses widely accessible for modeling species niches and distributions” from the Advances in Biological Informatics program (Division of Biological Infrastructure) to produce the first full release of Wallace, a user-friendly and modular web application for advanced niche/distributional modeling.
   

• Beth Gerstner wins the CCNY Professor Martin Sacks/Sylvia F. Rubin Award for the graduating student demonstrating the greatest proficiency in research in Environmental Science.
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• Jamie Kass will be supported by Grant-in-Aid of Research (American Society of Mammalogists: $1500) to extend field work in 2017 for study on invasive raccoons in Japan.
   

• Jamie Kass was selected for the Provost’s Digital Innovation Grant (CUNY Graduate Center: $10,000). This grant for the academic year 2016-2017 will allow him to continue the development of Wallace, a user-friendly and modular web application for advanced niche/distributional modeling.
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• Jamie Kass received an NSF/JSPS grant (East Asia Pacific Summer Institutes Fellowship; $10,000) to conduct research in Japan during the summer of 2016. Read CCNY press here.
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• Jamie Kass received a grant from CUNY Doctoral Student Research Grant Program to fund one of his dissertation projects: research on the spread of the invasive North American raccoon in Japan, and its interactions with the native raccoon dog (which belongs to a different family of carnivorans).
   

• Beth Gerstner's data collection on bats at the American Museum of Natural History has been used for a study spearheaded by Laurel Yohe, a Ph.D. student at Stony Brook University. The resulting multi-authored paper has been published in Biology Letters and is titled "Bayesian hierarchical models suggest oldest known plant-visiting bat was omnivorous". A link to the article can be found here.
   

• Jamie Kass and Rob Anderson were part of a team selected as Finalists in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) Nielsen Challenge (GBIF press release) for their development of the beta software "Wallace" -- which combines data from the GBIF network with two recently developed R packages (spThin and ENMeval).
   

• Maria Gavrutenko was awarded the 2015 Ward Medal and Stratford Prize from the Department of Biology at CCNY (Stratford Prize, for the graduating senior demonstrating the greatest proficiency in both coursework in zoology and zoological research).

 

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