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Erik was recently awarded the Donald L. Bleitz Award, a small research grant from the American Ornithological Society. The proposal he submitted to them was titled "Evolutionary impacts of historical and contemporary changes in habitat on alpine specialists". He will use this funding to conduct some whole genome sequencing of rosy-finches, and to pair the analyses of these genomes with environmental niche models to investigate how historical changes in climate may have impacted distribution and other aspects of rosy-finch evolutionary histories. The hope is to then forecast these changes under a variety of climate models to try to evaluate the impacts of climate change.