Scott V. Edwards is the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard University and Curator of Ornithology at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. Prof. Edwards is an evolutionary biologist, with diverse interests in the evolution of birds and how they respond to a changing planet. Edwards has served as President of the Society for the Study of Evolution and other scientific societies and serves on the Advisory Boards of the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian), the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and the Adventure Cycling Association. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

J. Michael Reed is a Professor of Biology at Tufts University. People in Prof. Reed's lab work on a variety of problems related to the distribution and persistence of species on human-altered landscapes, mostly with birds. Reed is particularly interested in threatened and endangered species on islands, birds

in coupled human-natural ecosystems such as working forests and wetlands, and in the extinction risk of small, isolated populations. He received his PhD from North Carolina State University in 1988, working on extinction risk of an endangered bird species. His recent research focuses on birds in Maine forests and in the Mojave Desert.