Angelo Soto-Centeno

Assistant Curator, Department of Mammalogy

Phone:
212-769-5596

Press & Special Programs

Lab website 

Code

New study reveals three distinct species of frog-eating bats

Education

  • University of Florida, Ph.D., 2013
  • Eastern Michigan University, M.S., 2004
  • Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico, B.S., 2001

Research Interests

Dr. Soto-Centeno is interested in population level processes and combines phylogeography, species distribution modeling, and fossils to solve questions at the species and population levels. A principal focus of his research program is recent mammal extinctions, primarily in Caribbean bats. He uses genomic, fossil, and distribution model data to examine how recent historical climate change and anthropogenic habitat change affected populations of island bats. The combined use of these data is powerful and helps him evaluate hypotheses about the evolutionary processes that shaped island bats and how they reacted to climate change and habitat change from past to present. This framework also allows to improve our understanding of what happens to these bats today and better predict what may happen to them in the future. This program is question-driven, and he applies these tools to other systems (e.g. rodents) in island and mainland environments. Other areas of research Dr. Soto-Centeno’s lab include biogeography, population demographics and connectivity, community composition, natural history, species delimitation, systematics and taxonomy. ​

Publications

Full list of publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=h8xGchYAAAAJ&hl=en

Recent Publications:

da Silva Fonseca, B., J.A. Soto-Centeno, N.B Simmons, A.D. Ditchfield, & Y.L.R. Leite. (2024) A species complex in the iconic bat Trachops cirrhosus (Chiroptera, Phyllostomidae) with high variation in the heart of the Neotropics. Am Mus. Novit. 4021:27 pp. https://doi.org/10.1206/4021.1 

Mônico, P.I.* & J.A. Soto-Centeno. (2024) Phylogenetic, morphological, and niche differentiation unveil new species limits for the big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus). Roy. Soc. Open Sci. 11:231384. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.231384 

Soto-Centeno, J.A. & N.B. Simmons. (2022) Environmentally driven phenotypic convergence and niche conservatism accompany speciation in hoary bats. Sci. Rep.12: 21877. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-26453-y 

Calderon-Acevedo, C.A., A. Rodriguez-Duran & J.A. Soto-Centeno. (2021) Effect of land use, habitat suitability, and hurricanes on the population connectivity of an endemic insular bat. Sci. Rept. 11:9115. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-88616-7 

Orihuela, J., L.W. Viñola*, O. Hernández de Laraa, A. Mychajliw, O. Jiménez Vázquez, L. Lorenzo, & J.A. Soto-Centeno. (2020) The role of humans on Greater Antillean land vertebrate extinctions: new insights from Cuba. Quat. Sci. Rev. 249:106597. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2020.106597 

Teaching Experience

  • General Biology for Biology majors
  • Phylogenetics (Graduate level)
  • Island Biogeography (Graduate level)
  • Phylogeographic Inference (Graduate level)
  • Mammalogy (Graduate level)