Rudiger Bieler

My research in my lab focuses on the biology of Mollusca, especially gastropods (snails) and bivalves (clams). I am interested in their species-level diversity, how it evolved over time, and how it is impacted by human activities.

My collections-based approach has been to advance the knowledge of such groups from the most basic scientific infrastructure needs, such as taxon and distributional catalogues, to monographic revisionary work and the training of new generations of specialists, to combined morphological-anatomical-ultrastructural and molecular analyses ultimately allowing our team to use advanced phylogenetic, phylogenomic, and modeling approaches, thus bringing these previously “neglected” taxa and research fields into the mainstream literature. Much of this is approached through series of National Science Foundation (NSF) award projects that build on one another (e.g., PEET, REVSYS, and AToL programs), provide for PhD student and postdoctoral researcher support, and foster the development of associated education and outreach components, including various local and traveling museum exhibitions. Similarly, my engagement in collections development and curation follows long-term trajectories, from large-scale digitization and archival compactorized storage for millions of specimens, to associated laboratory development and to the latest and ongoing efforts (jointly with our Insect collections) to provide online niche-modelling access to the digitized data. Other, strongly field-work-oriented and collections-building, projects deal with regional biodiversity studies, often in the context of detecting invasive or endangered taxa. A special focus is a long-...