Jeff Foster–Scatological Adventures in Avian Food Webs

Professor, Department of Biological Sciences & Pathogen and Microbiome Institute, Northern Arizona University

Despite food and foraging being critical to maintaining bird populations, efficient and detailed assessment of diets has been elusive for many species. Molecular approaches, specifically fecal metabarcoding, have revolutionized our understanding of what birds eat. This talk will describe recent developments in the molecular analysis of bird diets from a variety of birds and environments, from shorebirds in the rocky intertidal zones of the Atlantic and wetlands of California’s Central Valley, to whip-poor-wills in the Midwest, and songbirds in rainforests, grasslands, and savannah in numerous states and countries. Numerous advances have been made but many challenges remain.

Jeff Foster is a Professor of Biology at Northern Arizona University. He received his PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where he studied the ecology of introduced bird species in Hawaii. He then did a postdoc at the Smithsonian researching the evolution of disease resistance to avian malaria in Hawaiian honeycreepers. As a faculty member, he has continued with disease ecology and pathogen evolution work in birds and several other taxa including bats, other wildlife, and livestock. Frustrated by the inefficient methods he used to identify insects and spiders in bird diets during his dissertation, he has returned to diet work and is now using molecular metabarcoding approaches.