RESEARCH

My research interest focuses in trying to understand the ecological and historical biogeographical mechanisms that have shaped patterns of freshwater fish species distribution in Central America. The Political Central America area is the area that includes seven Central American countries, from Belize to Panama. However, since fishes don’t understand about political boundaries my research expands to areas outside political Central America and my data sets very often will include records from Mexico and northern South America. In order to better understand Central American freshwater fishes distribution, I and my collaborators have invested a fair amount of time sampling in Central America, reviewing inter-institutional museum data bases, and visiting museum collections.

This work has yielded updated and more comprehensive by country and river drainage freshwater fishes checklist for Honduras (Matamoros et al. 2009), El Salvador (McMaham et al. in review) and Panama (in preparation). As a result of extensive work in Central America, three new species to science have been described (and many more to come). Finally, in order to understand the historical biogeographical patterns on the region my research also thrives in the fields of phylogenetic systematic and phylogeography.