Specific responsibility: Curation, development, digitisation and research use of the bird collections, primarily skins, eggs, and skeletons.

Research interests/expertise: Avian speciation and evolution, as well as taxonomy, using integrative approaches that pair fieldwork and morphological study with modern genomic methods.

Dr Stervander studied evolutionary biology at Lund University, Sweden, and the University of Queensland, followed by a PhD at Lund in 2015 on genomic signatures of speciation across space and time in birds. He was then a Swedish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oregon 2017–2020 and a Marie Skłodowska‑Curie Fellow at the Natural History Museum (NHM) 2020–2022. He served as Senior Curator of Birds in a project at NHM 2023, before taking up post in Edinburgh, and remains a Scientific Associate with the NHM bird group since 2024.

Dr Stervander’s research interests are broad (reflected by his full publication list) and include, among others:

Avian speciation, hybridisation, adaptive radiation, and genome evolution
Convergent evolution in island systems, particularly loss of flight
Museomics, phylogenomics, phylogeography
Integrative taxonomy

He contributes to the ornithological community in various ways, including as Managing Editor of the open access and ornithological journal Ornis Svecica, which has no author fees and welcomes contributions from both scientist and non-academic researchers. Dr Stervander is also engaged as a core team member in the unified global bird taxonomy AviList, serving on the technical committee, the Palearctic taxonomic regional advisory group, and as taxonomic sequence specialist. Further, he is a member of BirdLife Sweden’s taxonomic committee, the Scottish Ornithological Club’s birding and science committee, and a fellow of the Linnean Society.

Dr Stervander also engages in outreach and, as an LGBTQ+ scientist, advocates for and practices diversity and inclusion in the work with science and natural history collections.

Selected publications

Stervander M., Chen G., Feng S. & Mayr G. 2025. Nesotrochidae, fam. nov. ‒ a new name for the New World cave rails Nesotrochis spp., sister taxon of the New Zealand adzebills (Aptornithidae). Avian Systematics2: 85–98.

Rheindt F.E., Donald P.F., Donsker D.B., Gerbracht J.A., Iliff M.J., Lepage D., Norman J.A., Rasmussen P.C., Schodde R., Schulenberg T.S., Areta J.I., Brammer J.P., Chesser R.T., Dowsett R.J., Peterson A., Alström P., Stervander M., Remsen J.V., Garnett S.T., Homberger D.G., Lei F. & Christidis L. 2025. AviList: a Unified Global Bird Checklist. Biodiversity and Conservation 34: 3359–3376. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-025-03120-y

Illera J.C., Rando J.C., Melo M., Valente L.L. & Stervander M. 2024. Avian island radiations shed light on the dynamics of adaptive and non-adaptive radiation. Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology. https://doi.org/10.1101/cshperspect.a041451.

Stiller, J., Feng, S., Chowdhury, AA., Rivas-González, I., Duchêne, D.A., Fang, Q., Deng, Y., Kozlov, A., Stamatakis, A., Claramunt, S., Nguyen, J.M.T., Ho, S.Y.W., Faircloth, B.C., Haag, J., Houde, P., Cracraft, J., Balaban, M., Mai, U., Chen, G., Gao, R., Zhou, C., Xie, Y., Huang, Z., Cao, Z., Yan, Z., Ogilvie, H.A., Nakhleh, L., Lindow, B., Morel, B., Fjeldså, J., Hosner, P.A., da Fonseca, R.R., Petersen, B., Tobias, J.A., Székely, T., Kennedy, J.D., Hart Reeve, A., Liker, A., Stervander, M.et al. 2024 Complexity of avian evolution revealed by family-level genomes. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07323-1

García-Navas, V., Stervander, M. & Alström, P. 2024. Diversification history and morphological evolution of larks. Evolutionary Journal of the Linnean Society3 (1): kzae002. https://doi.org/10.1093/evolinnean/kzae002

Alström, P., Mohammadi, Z., Donald, P.F., Nymark, M., Enbody, E.D., Irestedt, M., Elisha, E.B., Ndithia, H.K., Tieleman, B.I., Engelbrecht, D., Olsson, U., Rancilhac, L., Stervander, M. 2023. Integrative taxonomy reveals unrecognised species diversity in African Corypha larks (Aves: Alaudidae), Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. https://doi.org/10.1093/zoolinnean/zlad107