About me
- johnjameswilson
- Liverpool, United Kingdom
- I am interested in how we can use DNA sequences to understand biodiversity – how do we recognise species, and how are species related at taxonomic, ecological and geographic levels? My passion for biodiversity research has led me from the world’s largest natural history collection - Natural History Museum, London, where I completed my MSc, to the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario - global centre for the international Barcode of Life, as a PhD student, and to the hyper-diverse tropics of Southeast Asia. The tropics will be the first regions to experience historically unprecedented climates and this will happen within the next decade. Consequently my recent research has focussed on understanding the effects of urbanisation and climate change on tropical and subtropical biodiversity - encompassing both species richness and ecological integrity across a diversity of taxonomic groups.
May 10, 2010
A Tale of Two Caterpillars
These two caterpillars are representatives of groups which turned out to be species complexes. The Ailanthus webworm moth discovery has been written about in a paper which has been accepted by the journal ZooKeys. The Andromeda satyr discovery has been covered by Janzen et al. 2009 (MOL ECOL RES) and in a new paper in review at ZooTaxa. Both groups are the subject of a talk I presented recently at the College of Biological Sciences (University of Guelph) Graduate Student Symposium and I will be presenting again at the Canadian Society of Zoologists Meeting in Vancouver, BC in a week.
