Avian Biology

Allison Johnson - I am a research assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln working for the School of Natural Resources as an avian biologist. I completed my PhD at the University of Chicago but got my start in ornithology in western Nebraska. I spent most winters growing up watching sandhill cranes migrate through the Platte River Basin, and several summers at Cedar Point Biological Station studying cliff swallows. These experiences instilled in me a love of ornithology, and of Great Plains birds in particular. 

My research addresses the evolutionary causes and consequences of social behavior in avian systems. I use a combination of field observation, experimentation, phylogenetic analysis, and social network modeling to understand sociality. I am investigating the costs and benefits of conspecific sociality and heterospecific sociality using long-term population monitoring of splendid and purple-backed fairywrens in South Australia. Specifically, I am interested in how social interaction both within and between species impacts survival, reproductive behavior, and foraging behavior, as well as how communication and individual recognition are used to mediate such varied social interactions. From a modeling perspective, I am interested in identifying whether or not simple rules of social attachment and dispersal can generate the complex social organizations seen in nature. I combine this theoretical approach with long-term data on the cooperatively-breeding fairywrens to understand what rules may generate variation in sociality across species. I am also beginning a project to understand how environment, resource limitation, and social benefits interact to generate variation in onset of moult and social group size and composition in Australian fairywrens. The Fairywren Project, cofounded by Joe Welklin at Cornell University, combines observations submitted by citizen scientists from across the Australian continent with long-term data collected by university labs. We are compiling these data from observations of multiple fairywren species to elucidate broad scale patterns between environment and sociality.