Guest speaker is Rodney Richardson from the University of Maryland. He will explain the landscape effects on colony growth and identifying pollen species with hi-tech DNA methods.
Dr. Richardson is an assistant professor of molecular ecology at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, Appalachian Laboratory. He has broad interests in applying molecular methods to ecological research questions and is particularly focused on questions of applied pollinator ecology. He has worked on a number of projects analyzing the pollen foraging patterns of honey bees and other cavity-nesting bee species. He also helped lead the analysis of a large-scale genome-wide associational study of honey bee colony-level traits. Currently, he is working to understand how landscape-scale changes are influencing insect pollinator nutrition, fitness and abundance. He is also working on multiple collaborative projects involving the application of amplicon sequencing techniques to uncover plant-pollinator and arthropod predator-prey interactions.
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