Virtual Professional Speaker Series - Cody Aylward, PhD Candidate at UC Davis

The San Francisco Bay area is home to several species, subspecies, and populations of wildlife that are uniquely adapted to coastal wetland habitat. Of these, there may be no better representative of marsh habitat health than the salt marsh harvest mouse (Reithrodontomys raviventris). The salt marsh harvest mouse is found only in the San Francisco Bay Area wetlands. It is highly restricted to marsh habitat and utilizes several unique adaptations – including strong climbing and swimming skills, and the ability to drink salt water – to persist in the saline, semi-aquatic environment. The salt marsh harvest mouse, like otherSan Francisco Bay Area endemics, has lost a significant amount of historical habitat due to conversion of marsh to primarily anthropogenic land uses. As a result, they were one of the first species listed on the California and United States Endangered Species lists. My work applies genetic and genomic tools to help better understand the modern range of salt marsh harvest mice and the evolutionary relationships between distinct populations within the Bay Area.

Cody Aylward, PhD Candidate, UC Davis: 

I am a conservation geneticist with ten years of experience working with threatened and endangered mammals. I am broadly interested in applying genomic tools to practical conservation outcomes, and in linking conservation research to land use. I earned a Master’s degree in Wildlife Science from the University of Vermont using spatial and genetic data to determine how American marten (Martes americana) recolonized parts of the northeastern United States and how landscape conditions may facilitate future population recovery. I recently completed my PhD program in Ecology at UC Davis, using genomic tools to reveal the evolutionary history, present distribution, spatial habitat requirements, and resource use of endangered salt marsh harvest mice in the SF Bay Area. In addition to research, I have spent the past several years teaching courses at UC Davis, such as the Conservation of Wild Mammals Laboratory, and I have served as a member of the American Society of Mammalogists Conservation Committee,working to ensure conservation policy accurate reflects the best available science.