News from the Field
Summer 2008
Drs. Eleanor Sterling and Kate McFadden of the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology, and led by the American Museum of Natural History, conducted research on globally threatened sea turtles at Palmyra Atoll in August. Their trip, with other researchers from the AMNH and the National Marine Fisheries Service, was the first time sea turtles were captured and studied in depth at this National Wildlife Refuge. Palmyra Atoll is located in the central Pacific and is managed jointly by the US Fish and Wildlife Service and The Nature Conservancy. Their research focused on determining the abundance and distribution of sea turtles at this atoll, applying satellite tags to monitor long range movements (i.e. migration), tagging, measuring and tissue sampling turtles for health, population genetics, and foraging ecology studies. Data collected on this population of turtles is vitally important to future restoration plans for this atoll, which was heavily utilized by the military during WWII as well as conservation recommendations for threatened green sea turtle stocks in the Pacific Ocean.
For the past year, Meha Jain, a first year E3B Ph.D. student, was studying the conservation benefits of community conserved areas in Rajasthan, India. Community conserved areas are patches of land that are used and managed solely by indigenous communities.
For the third summer, Jake Lowenstein, a third year Ph.D. student in E3B, participated in efforts led by the American Museum of Natural History to document the fishes of the
Lower Congo rapids. This year the team was accompanied by a USGS hydrologist and world class kayakers with doppler retrofitted boats. In addition to documenting undescribed species, the team mapped the river floor, finding a maximum depth of over 700 feet.
This summer, Hara Woltz, a first year student in the E3B Ph.D. program, spent some time in the Galapagos researching Waved Albatross. The project was funded by the American Bird Conservancy. The only breeding site of the endangered Waved Albatross (Phoebastria irrorata) is effectively the island of Española, the southeastern-most
of the Galapagos Islands. The status of the Central Colony is of particular interest because of the large area that it may occupy, and hence potential nesting population that it may support.
Kristin Tremain, a second year E3B MA student, spent the summer working with Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks (MT FWP) at the Wildlife Conservation Society in Bozeman, Montana. State agencies such as MT FWP have been collecting trapping data on furbearing mammals for decades, yet a lot of this data have never been analyzed. Over the summer she entered 30 years of bobcat trapping location data into a newly developed data management system for MT FWP. Next she will analyze this data to determine if the home range of the bobcat has expanded to higher elevations over the last three decades. If so, can this home range expansion be attributed to climate change and decreasing snowpack at higher elevations, thereby allowing bobcats to expand to areas where traditionally deep winter snow prevented them from entering?
Jeffrey Goldis, a second year E3B MA student, worked as a consultant for the Wildlife Conservation Society developing a database and a number of case studies highlighting the key attributes of existing carbon forestry projects. He also interned at the Bronx River Alliance where he was responsible for attending NYCDEC and mayor's office public meetings as well as drafting a comment letter in response to the city's Long Term Control Plan for addressing combined sewer overflow into NYC's waterbodies. In addition, Jeffrey worked at Equator Environmental LLC, an environmental commodities management firm where he was chiefly responsible for helping to develop terrestrial carbon projects in order to create and market carbon credits.
Leah Card, second year E3B MA student, surveyed the vegetation and took various measurements of several tree species in the Kakamega Forest, Kenya, in order to estimate the fruit biomass present in the home ranges of blue monkeys (Cercopithecus mitis). These biomass estimations were performed on tree species whose fruit are important to the diet of the blue monkeys.
Natalia Rossi, a second year E3B MA student on Fulbright, joined the Proyecto Caguama, better known as proCaguama, four years ago. This year, she collected samples for her thesis which intends to verify key life history traits of the Baja California Sur, Mexico (BCS) foraging population to evaluate demographic effects of this bycatch mortality. The critically endangered North Pacific loggerhead turtle (Caretta caretta) nests exclusively in Japan, and juveniles undertake developmental migrations that can last several decades and span the entire Pacific. Juvenile loggerheads aggregate in the rich waters of BCS, apparently to forage their way to maturity and to fuel their return migration to Japan, where they are thought to remain through adulthood. Because hundreds of loggerheads are accidentally killed in small-scale fisheries along the BCS coast annually, conservation efforts are essential for this unique hotspot in the planet.
Andy Booms, an E3B senior, conducting research for his senior thesis,
spent the summer at Fort Pickett in Blackstone, VA doing a camera-trap
survey and habitat analysis focused on estimating the bobcat
population on the National Guard post (supported by an EI grant). He is currently working on the data analysis now and will finish in December.
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