Kimberly Rosvall
Indiana University, IN·Ecology & Evolution·Early-career
Animals can often change what they do faster than their bodies can evolve. This research asks how behavior helps wild birds cope with environmental challenges, from rising heat to competition with rivals.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Biology
Neuroscience
- Topics
animal behavior
behavioral ecology
heat stress
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Dec 2028
What they work on
- Identify causes and consequences of individual differences in how tree swallows behave under heat, by warming nest cavities with heat packs and cross-fostering chicks between nests.
- Determine how recent heat experience, or behavioral acclimation, changes how tree swallows respond to later heat challenges in free-living nests.
- Compare tree swallow populations to test whether they differ in their behavioral capacity to reduce heat stress, and measure fitness-related consequences of nest heating.
- Test experimentally how individual differences in female aggression arise in the brain, by measuring neurogenomic responses (changes in brain gene activity) to aggressive encounters.
- Use phylogenetic comparisons of more than 30 bird species to test whether the environmental and physiological drivers of female aggression are shared or unique across species.
More about the research
It combines field experiments, studies of gene activity in the brain, and comparisons across species to understand where behavioral differences come from and whether they matter for survival and reproduction.
Why it matters
As heatwaves intensify, wildlife managers need to know which animals can cope. The heat study provides basic data that could inform predictive models and conservation decisions, and its framework could extend to other human-caused stresses such as wildfire smoke, urban noise and endocrine-disrupting chemicals. The aggression study adds understanding of how behavioral differences arise and evolve in females across many species.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Collaborative Research: Is behavior on the front-line of solving the problem of inescapable heat? Leveraging intraspecific variation in a cavity-nesting bird thriving in heat
NSF · Jan 2025 – Dec 2028
CAREER: How female aggression evolves: scaling genomics and phenomics from individuals to species
NSF · Mar 2020 – Feb 2027
Closest labs
Clinton Francis
California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, CA·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether noise and light pollution consistently favor a similar set of traits across six songbird species that differ in life history and tolerance of humans.
Jacinta Beehner
University of Michigan, MI·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether female non-human primates use aggression and dominance to monopolize males and gain social benefits such as protection and infant care, using long-term behavioral and demographic databases.
Kent Hatch
New College of Florida, FL·Ecology & Evolution
Test the relative importance of environmental filtering, host selection, spatial connectivity, microbial competition, cospeciation and host switching in shaping marine invertebrate microbiomes, using models from evolutionary and metacommunity ecology.
The school
Indiana University: 21 labs on PI Pages, $897M a year on research, 438 research doctorates a year.
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