Allan J. Baker

Allan John Baker (9 July 1943 – 20 November 2014) was a Canadian ornithologist of New Zealand descent. He was an authority on wading birds, in particular studies on red knots were one of his main research fields.

Career[]

Baker grew up on a farm near Collingwood, Golden Bay, New Zealand. In 1972, he promoted to Ph.D. on the University of Canterbury in Christchurch with a thesis on the ecology and evolution of oystercatchers titled 'The comparative biology of New Zealand oystercatchers.'^[1] In the same year he moved to Canada where he started as assistant curator of the ornithology department at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. In 1976, he became associate curator and head of the Ornithology Department. In 1995, he became director of the Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Biology and in 2004 head of the Department of Biology at the Royal Ontario Museum. In 1981, he was promoted to senior curator.

Accolades[]

In 2006, he received the Speirs Award by the Society of Canadian Ornithologists. In 2007, he was awarded with the Brewster Medal of the American Ornithologists' Union.

Works[]

• Ree, Richard H., and Stephen A. Smith. "Maximum likelihood inference of geographic range evolution by dispersal, local extinction, and cladogenesis." Systematic biology 57, no. 1 (2008): 4-14.
• Baker, Allan J., Patricia M. Gonzalez, Theunis Piersma, Lawrence J. Niles, Ines de Lima Serrano do Nascimento, Philip W. Atkinson, Nigel A. Clark, Clive DT Minton, Mark K. Peck, and Geert Aarts. "Rapid population decline in red knots: fitness consequences of decreased refuelling rates and late arrival in Delaware Bay." Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences 271, no. 1541 (2004): 875–882.
• Nylander, Johan AA, Urban Olsson, Per Alström, and I. S. A. B. E. L. SANMARTin. "Accounting for phylogenetic uncertainty in biogeography: a Bayesian approach to dispersal-vicariance analysis of the thrushes (Aves: Turdus)." Systematic Biology 57, no. 2 (2008): 257–268.
• BAKER, ALLAN J. "Mitochondrial control region sequences as tools for understanding evolution." (1997): 51–82.
• Haddrath, Oliver, and Allan J. Baker. "Complete mitochondrial DNA geonome sequences of extinct birds: ratite phylogenetics and the vicariance biogeography hypothesis." Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences 268, no. 1470 (2001): 939–945.

References[]

• Theunis Piersma: In grateful remembrance: Allan J. Baker, 1943–2014. Wader Study Group Bulletin, Volume 121, Issue 3, 2015. International Wader Study Group