Outreach

All of our research activities have a significant focus on capacity-building through the education and training of both American and Malagasy students. Yoder and her collaborators have a strong track record in student training and capacity-building in Madagascar, and this experience forms the background for many of our projects. Research opportunities for American graduate students are enhanced by the formation of Malagasy/American partnerships wherein Malagasy students will serve as mentor/guides while in Madagascar, with the converse being true in the U.S. By working together in a mutual exploration of the natural and biogeographic history of specific groups of Malagasy vertebrates, the student pairs can efficiently progress from field, to lab, to analysis, to completion and write up of their respective theses. Moreover, field activities are building natural history collections both in the U.S., namely at the Field Museum of Natural History, and in Madagascar. At least 50% of the vertebrate specimens collected remain in Madagascar at the Université d’Antananarivo, Département de Biologie Animale (UADBA), or will be subsequently repatriated to that institution. Over the past decade, considerable advances have been made to the collection infrastructure at the UADBA, and our collaboration with Steve Goodman of the FMNH and Vahatra [link to Vahatra] has assisted with the development of skilled academics to oversee these collections. Furthermore, the residence in Madagascar of one of the PIs, Steve Goodman, assures the continued commitment to long-term curation. We aim to produce a number of online electronic products that will be internationally available. We will develop a project web site that includes links to specimen data, spatially-indexed fauna records, geospatial analyses, all scientific publications to emerge from the project, and to primary genetic data via reference to GenBank and TreeBASE accessions.