Alivia Nytko

About Me

Hello! My name is Alivia Nytko and I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Bailey and O'Meara labs in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at the University of Tennessee.

I am an evolutionary ecologist and computational biologist studying geographic, functional trait-based, and phylogenetic dimensions of species rarity. In my dissertation, I have built a general model of discretized rarity, combining rarity dimensions at regional and local scales. I am particularly interested in using this multidimensional framework to understand the evolutionary processes generating rarity through time.

I enjoy working with a wide variety of study systems from angiosperms to North American birds. I am also passionate about methods development and providing biological software and AI integration tools that apply new conceptual frameworks, analyze large biodiversity datasets, and visualize complex macroecological and evolutionary dynamics through space and time.

When I’m not working on research you can find me reading, painting, or hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains.

Academic Profiles

Google Scholar | ResearchGate | ORCID | | GitHub | Figshare | Bluesky