Andrew J. Crawford
Associate Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, University of the Andes, Colombia
Welcome to my homepage, version 2.0. Please check back now and then for updated content and new photos. Feedback is always appreciated. You may email me at andrew-∀-dna.ac (replace "-∀-" with "@", obviously).
I am now in my eighth year at the Universidad de los Andes' Department of Biological Sciences, located in chilly Bogotá, Colombia. I specialize in the use of DNA sequence data to understand the evolution of biodiversity at a variety of spatial and temporal scales. I use evolutionary genetics to explore the origins of amphibian and reptile communities throughout the Neotropics, with particular attention to the frog fauna of Panama and Colombia. My current work is focused on integrating ecological variable into phylogeography, which may help bridge the gaps between ecology, population genetics and broad-scale biogeography. My publications in population genetics, phylogenetics, phylogeography, molecular evolution and herpetology are available on my PDFs page.
While biodiversity exists at many levels, from genes to biomes, when people talk about biodiversity, they are usually referring to the number of species. Species are both units of conservation and subjects of perennial interest in evolutionary biology. Therefore, I am also involved in the theoretical and practical aspects of how species are discovered, defined, delimited, described, and differentiated. I study amphibian diversity and taxonomy, specializing in direct developing frogs of Isthmian Central America and Colombia (the genera Craugastor, Pristimantis, Strabomantis, and Diasporus).
During my years in Panama, I've personally witnessed the decline of frog populations in the mountains of Central Panama, a recent symptom of a global problem. Noticable environmental changes used to take generations (Why, in my day, Sonny...). Nowadays, you can see the declines from one year to the next. (And we have no idea yet how to stop them.) In 2007, two friends (Drs. Karen R. Lips and Roberto Ibáñez) and I conducted a series of field surveys in eastern Panama to characterize the amphibian fauna before it, too, declines. Our work was financed by the Committee for Research and Exploration of the National Geographic Society.
And help Save the Frogs!
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Something on these pages was last modified by me on: 10 January 2019
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I write these pages with TextWrangler in raw XHTML with CSS which I learned from this book. I am so 1997!