Current research projects...


Research at the Botero Lab is currently structured around three main themes...​
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coping with variable and unpredictable environments

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time as evidenced by the increased variability and predictability of local climates and the profound effects these changes are having on multiple species around the world. At the Botero Lab, we use theoretical models and comparative biogeographic analyses, to improve our understanding of whether and how animals will adapt to these changes and to help generate more accurate predictions of species' vulnerabilities to climate change.

Evolutionary ecology of the avian brain

PictureAmazona viridigenalis
Despite centuries of interest in the diversity of vertebrate brains, we still have a limited understanding of the factors that drove the evolution of differences in brain size, shape, and connectivity among closely related lineages. Similarly, our knowledge of how these changes may have subsequently affected the ecology and evolution of these lineages remains largely speculative. Two related methodological challenges have slowed down our progress on these fronts: (1) investigating the links between brains, ecology and evolution requires having directly comparable metrics for a large number of species and environments; and (2) brain metrics that can be easily obtained from many species often provide limited information on cognitive ability. Our team is directly addressing these data deficiencies in a variety of ways and employing innovative analytical methods to help fill in some of the most fundamental gaps in our understanding of the ecological and evolutionary consequences of variation in cognition and brain architecture among birds. 
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cultural evolution

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The Botero Lab is an active member of the D-PLACE collaborative, a multidisciplinary team that employs the tools of ecology and evolutionary biology to study linguistic diversity and cultural change in humans.  This exciting collaboration has led to new insights on the ecological drivers of religious beliefs, the way in which demography and ecology shaped patterns of linguistic diversity in Australia, the ecological context that ushered the transition to agriculture as our main mode of subsistence, the ecological and cultural drivers of global variation in subsistence strategies, and the most likely evolutionary pathways to social inequality.