Kenneth Kozak

Kenneth Kozak
Associate Professor
Bell Museum Amphibians & Reptiles Collection Curator
[email protected]
612-624-3982
100 Ecology Building
Amphibian & Reptile Collection at the Bell Museum
Education

Ph.D., Washington University

Areas of Interest

Amphibians & reptile biogeography and evolution

Teaching

FW 4101 - Herpetology (Spring odd years)

FW 4301 - Conservation Genetics (Spring even years)

Research

Phylogeography, molecular ecology, and historical biogeography of amphibians and reptiles; biodiversity informatics; applications of GIS to evolutionary biology, ecology, and conservation biology.

Research in my laboratory uses amphibians and reptiles as a study system to understand the evolutionary and ecological mechanisms by which species diversify and accumulate through time. Much of our work involves reconstructing the evolutionary history of populations and species using molecular data. We then combine that information with spatial-environmental data to investigate how climatic variation, geology, and other features of the landscape influence patterns of genetic variation and species diversity. Ongoing research in the lab is focused on (1) phylogeography and speciation in temperate and tropical salamanders, (2) the influence of climate change on the evolution and persistence of montane amphibians, and (3) understanding how evolutionary history and climatic variation interact to drive latitudinal and elevational variation in species diversity.

Select Publications

Pierson, T. W. +, Kozak, K. H., Glenn, T. C., & Fitzpatrick, B. W. 2024. River drainage reorganization and reticulate evolution in the Two-Lined Salamander (Eurycea bislineata) species complex. Systematic Biology.  doi: DOI:10.1093/sysbio/syad06

Radomoski, T.+, S,R. Kuchta, and K.H. Kozak. 2022. Post-Pleistocene dispersal explains the Rapoport effect in North American salamanders. Journal of Biogeography 49:1048-1060.

Radomski, T+., Beamer, D., Babineau, A., Wilson, C., Pechmann, J., & K.H. Kozak 2022. Finding what you don't know: Testing SDM methods for poorly known species. Diversity and Distributions 28: 1769-1780. 
 
Lyons, M.P., and K.H. Kozak. 2019. Vanishing islands in the sky? A comparison of correlation- and mechanism-based forecasts of range dynamics for montane salamanders under climate change., Ecography 43:481-4. DOI: 10.1111/ecog.04282. 

Weaver, S.+, D.B. Shepard, and K.H. Kozak. 2020 Developmental life history is associated with accelerated rates of climatic niche evolution in a salamander adaptive radiation. Evolution 74:1804-1814.
 
Markle, T.M, and K.H. Kozak. 2018. Low acclimation capacity of narrow-ranging thermal specialists exposes susceptibility to global climate change. Ecology and Evolution. 8:4644-4656. DOI: 10.1002/ece3.4006