Dr.  Mary E. Blair

About Me

I am the Director of Biodiversity Informatics Research at the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History and also an Affiliated Professor at the Richard Gilder Graduate School at AMNH and at Columbia University's Dept. of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology

As a conservation biologist, I am interested in the evolutionary processes that generate biodiversity, the influence of environmental variability on evolutionary divergence, and how knowledge of evolutionary processes can inform conservation planning and the spatial prioritization of conservation actions. My research integrates spatial modeling and molecular genetics alongside knowledge from diverse sources and perspectives in a biocultural conservation framework, which explicitly starts with and builds upon local and Indigenous values, knowledge, and needs while recognizing the interplay between the cultural and biological parts of a system. I am also interested in developing open-source software tools to expand access to state-of-the art research techniques for conservation practitioners, and in unlocking the enormous potential of museomic approaches for advancing conservation biology research. 

I am currently leading a new project funded by NASA to support a biodiversity monitoring system for Colombia's Protected Areas, and have led related work, also funded by NASA, to expand the open-source species distribution modeling (SDM) software Wallace to facilitate biodiversity observation network assessment and reporting by conservation practitioners. I am also a co-author of the 2017 open-source release of Maxent, the most commonly used software algorithm for SDM. I am also co-leading NSF-funded research on the evolutionary history and conservation of slow lorises and galagos (read more here) using museum conservation genomics and I recently led interdisciplinary research on the diversity of slow lorises and the patterns, scales, and drivers of illicit trade in these and other animals in Vietnam. You can explore videos and read blogs about CBC-AMNH's open source software tools, my research in Vietnam, and more here on the links page.

You can also read more about my work on the Research page, or you can follow me on researchgate, google scholar or Twitter @marye_blair.