Biology Researcher Receives Award for Work on Ozark Fish Communities

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Zachary Zbinden, left, receives the SDAFS award from Kevin Myers.

The Southern Division of the American Fisheries Society presented the Jimmie Pigg Memorial Outstanding Student Achievement Award to Zachery D. Zbinden, a doctoral student in the Department of Biological Sciences, during the society's annual meeting in Little Rock Feb. 20-23.

The award was named posthumously for Jimmie Pigg, a fisheries biologist for 20-pus years with the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation. It is one of the most prized and meaningful awards from the SDADFS in that it recognizes the travel support and professional training provided to young fisheries scientists by Pigg.

Zbinden won the award based on two publications in scientific journals (Freshwater Biology and Ecology & Evolution) that combined his master's thesis data (from the University of Oklahoma) with data collected by Pigg. Zbinden's dissertation research (conducted in the lab of Marlis and Michael Douglas, both professors in the Department of Biological Sciences) will quantify processes that drive persistence and species diversification in Ozark stream fish communities over space and time.

Zbinden's research employs a multivariate analysis of ecological and genomics data gathered on approximately 3,000 individual fishes from 30-plus species across more than 50 sites on the Ozark Plateau.