OXFORD — Dr. Town Peterson, professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Kansas and Talawanda High School graduate, will give a seminar at 7:30 p.m. today at Miami University’s Pearson Hall, room 218.

The seminar, titled “Birds of the World: Assessing the Status of Accessible Knowledge of World Birds,” is being presented by Audubon Miami Valley, and is free and open to the public.

If there is a large crowd, the seminar will be moved to 116 Pearson Hall.

Dr. Peterson, whose formal training began at Miami with a degree in zoology, is a world renowned scholar who has done significant modeling on the impact of global climate warming and its future impact on living organisms, especially birds.

His research focuses on aspects of the geography of biodiversity, especially the geography and ecology of species’ distributions in space and time.

In his graduate studies at the University of Chicago, he specialized in tropical ornithology with a particular focus on systematics.

Dr. Peterson’s work, however, has taken him into other fields, including conservation biology and planning, invasive species biology, and disease transmission systems. His work is collaborative in nature and usually involves geographers, computer scientists and biologists.