It was the first time that I attended and presented at a herp meeting, and it was a great experience. Such a great group of reserachers, agency people, law enforcement, and zoo personnel, all working on projects related to this group of turtles. Really cool experience.
I was asked to provide an overview of what we’ve been doing in the spotted turtle genetic work. The conference had a tremendously wide variety of topics surrounding these species. Here is the agenda.
In addition to myself, there were two other genetics presentations by Mark Jordan talking about Patterns of standing Genetic variation and Effective population size in Blanding’s Turtle Populations and another by Andrew Whitley on Population genetic analysis of the wood turtle across its us native range. Both of these talks were really well delivered, informative and inspiring.
Here are my slides that I presented along with co-authors Madison Whitehurst and Caleb Krueger.
It was really nice to get up into the semi-mountainous areas in Pennsylvania (and out of the more humid piedmont of Virginia) for a while.