We pride ourselves on our ability to work across multiple disciplines to derive insights about how butterflies and moths evolved and continue to change in response to climate, land use, and other drivers.
Global Change and Lepidopteran Biodiversity
We are primarily interested in study how global change processes influence butterfly and moth distributions, life-history events, shape, size, and color, as well as ecological interactions.
Understudied Ecosystems for Lepidopterans
Much of our work focuses on understudied or poorly sampled locations for lepidopteran biodiversity including high elevation, high latitude, and arid regions of the world.
Conservation Policy and Rulemaking
Because our work is deeply connected to human decision-making, we also examine how science influences management, policy, and rulemaking at various levels of governance.
AI and Biodiversity Science
To do all of this work, we leverage a cutting-edge toolkit of data science, statistics, and artificial intelligence tools to collect, synthesize, and analyze data.
You can find publications produced by members of our lab group for each year below.
Lab members are highlighted in bold.
| Publication Year | Citation |
|---|---|
| 2025 | V. Shirey, J.M.M. Lewthwaite, A.M. Gawel, and L.M. Guzman. 2025. "50 Years of Invertebrate Conservation Under the United States Endangered Species Act—History and Threats to Species." In press at Frontiers in Conservation Science |
| 2025 | M. Belitz, C.J. Campbell, R. Drum, W. Leuenberge, ..., V. Shirey, ..., and E. Zipkin. 2025. "A Case for Assemblage-level Conservation to Address the Biodiversity Crisis." In press at Nature Reviews Biodiversity. |
| 2024 | V. Shirey and J. Rabinovich. 2024. "Climate Change-induced Degradation of Expert Range Maps Drawn for Kissing Bugs (Hemiptera: Reduviidae) and Long-standing and Future Sampling Gaps Across the Americas." Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz. |
| 2024 | B. Goldstein, S. Stoudt, J.M.M. Lewthwaite, V. Shirey, E. Mendoza, and L.M. Guzman. 2024. "Logistical and Preference Bias in Participatory Science Butterfly Data." Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. |
| 2024 | V. Shirey, N. Neupane, R. Guralnick, and L. Ries. 2024. "Rising Minimum Temperatures Contribute to 50 Years of Occupancy Decline Among Cold-adapted Arctic and Boreal Butterflies in North America." Global Change Biology. |
| 2024 | J. Lewthwaite, T. Baiotto, B.V. Brown, Y.Y. Cheung, A.J. Baker, C. Lehnen, T.P. McGlynn, V. Shirey, E. Wood, and L.M. Guzman. 2024. "Drivers of Arthropod Biodiversity in an Urban Ecosystem." Scientific Reports. |
| 2024 | K. Wheeler, M. Dietze, D. LeBauer, ..., V. Shirey, ..., and L. Zachmann. 2024. "Predicting Spring Phenology in Deciduous Broadleaf Forests: NEON Phenology Forecasting Community Challenge." Agricultural and Forest Meteorology. |
| 2023 | V. Shirey and L. Ries. 2023. “Population dynamics and drivers of the eastern monarch (Danaus plexippus) across its full annual cycle: a cross-scale synthesis of a model migratory species.” Current Opinion in Insect Science 60. |
| 2023 | H.C. Stevens, A.C. Smith, E.R. Buechley, C.H. Şekercioğlu, V. Shirey, K.V. Rosenberg, F.A. La Sort, D. Tallamy, and P.P. Marra. 2023. “Species-specific ecological traits, phylogeny, and geography underpin vulnerability to population declines for North American birds.” Ornithological Applications. |
| 2023 | S.C. Mason Jr., V. Shirey, E.S. Waite, M.R. Gallagher, N.S. Skowronski. 2023. ”Exploring prescribed fire severity changes to ground beetle (Coleoptera: Carabidae) taxonomic and functional community composition.” Fire 6 (9). |
| 2023 | T. Rippel, C. Minsavage-Davis, V. Shirey, and G. Wimp. 2023. ”Simple machine learning with aerial imagery reveals severe loss of a salt marsh foundation species.” Estuaries and Coasts 51. |
| 2023 | A.Y. Kawahara, C. Storer, A.P.S. Carvalho, D.M. Plotkin, F. Condamine, M.P. Braga, E.A. Ellis, R.A. St. Laurent, X. Li, V. Barve, L. Cai, C. Earl, P.B. Frandsen, H.L. Owens, W.A. Valencia-Montoya, K. Aduse-Poku, E.F.A. Toussaint, K.M. Dexter, T. Doleck, …, S. Schröder, V. Shirey, D. Soltis, …, and D.J. Lohman. 2023. ”A global phylogeny of I butterflies reveals their evolutionary history, ancestral hosts, and biogeographic origin.” Nature Ecology and Evolution 7: 90 -913. |
| 2022 | M. Belitz, E. Larsen, V. Shirey, D. Li, and R. Guralnick. 2022. “Phenological research based on natural history collections: practical guidelines and a Lepidopteran case study.” Functional Ecology 37(2): 234 - 247. |
| 2022 | F.X. Palacio, C. Callaghan, P. Cardoso, E.H. Hudgins, M. Jarzyna, G. Ottaviani, F. Riva, G. Roza, V. Shirey, and S. Mammola. 2022. “A protocol for reproducible functional diversity analyses.” Ecography 2022 (11). |
| 2022 | V. Shirey, E. Larsen, A. Doherty, C. Kim+, F. Al-Sulaiman+, J. Hinolan, M. Naive, M. Itliong, M. Ku, M. Belitz, G. Jeschke, V. Barve, A.Y. Kawahara, R. Guralnick, N. Pierce, D. Lohman, and L. Ries. 2022. “LepTraits 1.0: a globally comprehensive dataset of butterfly traits.” Scientific Data 9(1): 1-7. |
| 2022 | V. Shirey, R. Khelifa, L. M’Gonigle, and L.M. Guzman. 2022. “Occupancy-detection models with museum specimen data: promise and pitfalls.” Methods in Ecology and Evolution 14(2): 402-414. |