Episode 201 - The Bird Genoscape Project With Jacob Job

One of the best ways to track the long-term health of a species or group of species, and to understand how biologically diverse they actually are, is to map the organism’s genome—the roadmap of genetic diversity. About a year I introduced you to Jacob Job, a professor at Colorado State University who had recently completed his Voices of a Flyway Project. Over the course of several months, Jacob traveled from the Gulf of Mexico all the way up to the Boundary Waters region of northern Minnesota along the Mississippi flyway, recording the voices of the natural world and interviewing everyone from oil field workers to Audubon volunteers about the remarkable ways that they all engage with the non-human citizens of the natural world. Jacob has now moved on to another project: The Bird Genoscape Project, which, through the collection and analysis of feathers, is creating a genomic database of all the birds in North America—and, perhaps, beyond.