New Perspectives in Ornithology: 21st Century Dispatches Across the World of Birds

People have been long-fascinated with birds, and their scientific study has been central to advances in evolution, animal behavior, biogeography, population dynamics, and community ecology. Research questions in these fields have been driven in part by innovations in technology. Ornithologists even 20 years ago could scarcely imagine the detail and precision with which we can now monitor bird populations on a global scale, whether through digital tools like eBird, indirectly through remote sensing satellites, or at closer range via drones.

Highlighting these advances, New Perspectives in Ornithology brings together leading and rising professionals across ornithology, spanning behavior and ecology to genomics and conservation. Organized thematically into five sections - ecology, evolution, behavior, citizen science, and conservation - the volume reflects the major swaths of modern ornithology.

Its contributions offer diverse perspectives on some of the most pressing challenges facing birds today, including climate change, habitat loss, and effects of urbanization. New Perspectives in Ornithology also showcases extraordinary and inspiring new insights into how birds work, their amazing colors and songs, movements around the globe, and their deep-time evolution.

Approachable and conversational in style, yet scientifically rigorous, this volume is essential reading for graduate students, early career researchers, and senior academics, and anyone else who will need to be aware of key approaches and conceptual domains in ornithology today.

Scott V. Edwards is the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard University and Curator of Ornithology at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Prof. Edwards is an evolutionary biologist, with diverse interests in the evolution of birds and how they respond to a changing planet. Edwards has served as President of the Society for the Study of Evolution and other scientific societies and serves on the Advisory Boards of the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian), the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and the Adventure Cycling Association. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

J. Michael Reed is a Professor of Biology at Tufts University. People in Prof. Reed’s lab work on a variety of problems related to the distribution and persistence of species on human-altered landscapes, mostly with birds. Reed is particularly interested in threatened and endangered species on islands, birds in coupled human-natural ecosystems such as working forests and wetlands, and in the extinction risk of small, isolated populations. He received his PhD from North Carolina State University in 1988, working on extinction risk of an endangered bird species. His recent research focuses on birds in Maine forests and in the Mojave Desert.