Robert's research is broadly focused on how populations have responded to past climate change. Specifically, he studies how the historical distributions and past areas of climate refugia of small mammals will influence future climate change responses. Robert earned my Bachelor of Science degree from City College of New York (CCNY) where he was introduced to studying the distributions of species through time. As a Master’s student at CCNY, he developed several methods to improve the performance of ecological niche models. Additionally, Robert helped develop several R packages to implement these approaches.

As a PhD student at the University of California-Merced, Robert studied the historical distribution and climate refugia of two western North American Mammals. As an NSF Postdoctoral scholar in Dr. Scott Edwards’ lab at Harvard University, his research will focus on projecting how genetic diversity will change in a warming world.

Selected publications:

Kass, JM, …  RA Boria, et al. ENMeval 2.0: redesigned for customizable and reproducible evaluations for models of species’ niches and distributions Methods in Ecology and Evolution (In press).

Boria, RA, et al. 2021. Understanding the population structure and historical demography of the Neotoma fuscipes in California. Heredity, 126: 521–536.

Boria, RA, and JL Blois. 2018. The effect of large sample sizes on ecological niche models: Analysis using a North American rodent, Peromyscus maniculatus. Ecological Modelling, 386: 83–88.

Boria, RA., et al. 2017. A single-algorithm approach to creating an ensemble of ecological niche models and generating maps of uncertainty. Diversity and Distributions, 23: 196–208.

Boria, RA, et al. 2014. Spatial filtering to reduce sampling bias can improve the performance of ecological niche models. Ecological Modelling, 275: 73–77.