research

/research

TBS Camera project is now more than a decade old

By | March 15th, 2016|Amazon, biodiversity, camera, research|

Beginning in 2005, John Blake and I initiated a camera project at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station with then station manager Jaime Guerra and USFQ professor and station co-directors David Romo and Kelly Swing.  With the help of the "tigres", the guys that work at the station, cameras were deployed along the 30+ km of trails [...]

Farah Carrasco featured on UF Graduate School web site

By | March 11th, 2016|graduate students, Peru, research, TCD|

PhD student Farah Carrasco Rueda was featured on the front page of the University of Florida Graduate School web page (click here and look at "slider" pictures) as part of Graduate Student Appreciation Week!!  Given the large number of graduate students on the University of Florida campus this is an honor indeed for Farah and [...]

Heading back to the Amazon

By | December 24th, 2015|Amazon, biodiversity, Bolivia, camera, Ecuador, research|

Winter break means field work!  On my way back to Yasuni Biosphere Reserve today for another field season in the Ecuadorian Amazon.  This is year 16 for our project on population dynamics of tropical birds, with a special emphasis on manakins.  This field trip I will find out if "old red" a 19+ yr old [...]

Double Play! Flavia Montano receives CALS scholarship!!

By | August 27th, 2015|Andes, birds, Bolivia, graduate students, research|

WEC PhD student Flavia Montano, joins labmate Farah Carrascco Rueda, in being awarded the Doris Lowe and Earl and Verna Lowe scholarship from UF’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. This $2000 award recognizes Flavia’s work in examining functional diversity and community assembly of birds along montane gradients in Bolivia. Congrats Flavia and Farah!

Off to the meetings…..

By | July 31st, 2015|graduate students, research|

Summer is a busy time and the lab is off to several meetings to present their findings: Association for Tropical Biology, 2015  (12-16 July, Honolulu, Hawaii): Gonzalo Rivas-Torres, Luke Flory, Damian Adams, & Bette Loiselle. Experimental removal of an exotic canopy-forming tree has mixed effects on native and non-native flora in the Galapagos. Neotropical Ornithological [...]

Congrats to Flavia Montano for receiving two new grants

By | July 26th, 2015|Bolivia, graduate students, research|

PhD student Flavia Montano has had a pretty exciting summer so far.  Besides conducting field work in the Bolivian Andes, Flavia learned that she has received two field research grants to support her dissertation research.  One is from the Lewis and Clark Fund for Exploration and Field Research from the American Philosophical Society.  Her second [...]

Porcupines can’t jump….

By | July 26th, 2015|Amazon, graduate students, Peru, research|

PhD student Farah Carrasco recently published a new paper with Dr. Tremaine Gregory from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, where they describe new information about a recently discovered and little known porcupine of tropical forests. This work results from an innovative camera trap study to examine the use of natural canopy bridges to mitigate forest gaps created [...]

New grants and papers from the lab

By | January 17th, 2015|birds, Costa Rica, ecology, field station, graduate students, research, tropical|

Flavia Montano was recently awarded a Field Museum Visiting Scholarship to travel to the Field Museum in Chicago and work with Dr. John Bates.  She will likely make this journey in Fall 2015 to examine and measure museum specimens of Bolivian birds as part of her dissertation research examining community assemblage and variation in functional traits along [...]

Trip to UNESP and Parque Estadual Intervales

By | December 18th, 2014|Atlantic Forests, birds, research|

Just back from a trip to visit colleagues Marco Pizo and Cesar Cestari at UNESP in Rio Claro.  We are in year 2 of a Science without Borders project investigating how male reproductive status influences their fruit foraging decisions.  During this trip we advanced significantly on some data analysis from field experiments run during previous [...]

Flavia Montano publishes new paper

By | November 19th, 2014|Andes, bats, graduate students, research|

Flavia and colleagues explore how habitat disturbance impacts species- and community-level responses of bats in the Andes in a new paper published in Acta Oecologica. Their study shows that at the individual species level, bats behavior and activity patterns can change even with low to moderate levels at disturbance.  Such responses might be missed if studies [...]