Welcome to the Barn Swallow Project!
We are a group of evolutionary biologists based at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA. Our research asks a fundamental biological question: what processes lead to the formation of new species? To address this question, we are studying population divergence in six subspecies of barn swallows.
We're hoping to use this website to make the project accessible to a wide audience--no advanced biology degrees necessary. Why are we doing this? Well, understanding how evolution works is not only incredibly interesting in and of itself, but is a critical aspect of any biological problem, from developing cancer-fighting drugs to conserving endangered species. And to understand how evolution works, we need to study it in lots of different ways. All these different evolutionary problems are fascinating, but they're also complicated. To make the scientific processes that go into evolutionary research clearer, we thought we would try and show what it's like to work on a new project, from start to finish: how we design experiments, collect data, and figure out what it all means.
So welcome! You can read more about our project here, and check out the bios of the people involved here. Check the blog often- we'll be posting pictures, videos, updates, and more details about the project as we travel around the world and dig into the genome of some interesting little birds. Additional photos and videos may be found under the photos tab. Please feel free to post comments!
We're hoping to use this website to make the project accessible to a wide audience--no advanced biology degrees necessary. Why are we doing this? Well, understanding how evolution works is not only incredibly interesting in and of itself, but is a critical aspect of any biological problem, from developing cancer-fighting drugs to conserving endangered species. And to understand how evolution works, we need to study it in lots of different ways. All these different evolutionary problems are fascinating, but they're also complicated. To make the scientific processes that go into evolutionary research clearer, we thought we would try and show what it's like to work on a new project, from start to finish: how we design experiments, collect data, and figure out what it all means.
So welcome! You can read more about our project here, and check out the bios of the people involved here. Check the blog often- we'll be posting pictures, videos, updates, and more details about the project as we travel around the world and dig into the genome of some interesting little birds. Additional photos and videos may be found under the photos tab. Please feel free to post comments!
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