Research Page of James C. Albright

Welcome to my webpage!  I am a graduate student at Florida State University presently working on my Master's degree.  My principal interests are in mammalian and avian systematics, biogeography, phylogeography, speciation, and macroevolutionary patterns.  I am engaging most of these interests to one degree or another in my research   project, which you can check out below.    

My adviser is Scott J. Steppan.  You can visit his webpage here. . 

You can also access my curriculum vitae in PDF format here.

The focus of my current research project concerns disentangling the historical biogeography of Phyllotis.  The tribe Phyllotini is a speciose group of mice endemic to the Andes. They are members of the family Muridae (the group which includes all rats and mice), and, within that, the subfamily Sigmodontinae (the new world mice and rats). The sigmodontines originated in North America and then colonized South America, where they radiated widely so that South America is now their center of diversity. The core range of the genus Phyllotis consists of  a north-south distribution through the central Andes. This region is encompassed by the far-ranging Phyllotis xanthopygus (the yellow-rumped leaf-eared mouse). My project centers on recovering the historical biogeography of this species through intraspecific phylogeography. There are deep mitochondrial gene-tree divergences among and between the several subspecies of P. xanthopygus, and there are several disjunct peripheral  populations. Additionally, the biogeography of the southern Andes is relatively poorly studied.  I intend to marry Phyllotis phylogeography with Andean biogeographic hypotheses for historical patterns of population movement based on paleoclimate and topography. The picture below depicts the type of cold, xeric landscape, characterized by bunchy puna grass, that is ideal habitat for Phyllotis. I posit that Pleistocene glaciation may have allowed range expansions and shifts associated with the general pattern of aridification and decreased temperatures in the southern cone. In addition to the empirical work on Phyllotis, I am also interested in modeling the sensitivity of phylogeographic analyses to different geographical measures of haplotype distributions. Phyllotines are an excellent system for this question because they have highly topographically structured ranges.

Contact Information

Location: 102 Conradi Building
Address: 
    Department of Biological Sciences 
    Florida State University 
    Tallahassee, FL, 32306-1100 

Telephone: (850) 644-6585               
E-mail: albright@bio.fsu.edu

Useful Links

Phylogeny and Phylogeography Programs                             

A fairly comprehensive list of Phylogenetic Tools compiled at the University of Washington.

Nested Clade Analysis (NCA): Geodis

Statistical parsimony haplotype network joining: TCS

Systematics Links

Smithsonian Mammalian Taxonomy 

Tree of Life                       

Florida State University Department of Biology

Ecology and Evolution at FSU