Yearly Archives: 2021

/2021

Emily Khazan is a PhD! Congratulations!!

By | December 3rd, 2021|Andes, biodiversity, butterflies, climate change, Colombia, graduate students|

Emily Khazan successfully defended her PhD dissertation in Interdisciplinary Ecology, UF's School of Natural Resources and Environment this past Wednesday, December 1st.  Her dissertation "Thermal, community, and microbial ecology of butterflies of the Colombian Andes" explored how butterflies from one of the most biodiversity-rich areas of the world adapt to their environments.  The work [...]

Vanessa Luna wins UF Doctoral Research Abroad Grant!

By | November 10th, 2021|Andes, graduate students, interdisciplinary, Peru, research|

Congratulations to PhD student D. Vanessa Luna-Celino for receiving a prestigious UF International Center Research Abroad Grant for her dissertation work on fire management and governance in the Andes of Peru.  Vanessa's research will explore how local Quechua communities govern the use of fire for agricultural practices in  the high Andes, including understanding measures to [...]

Mahi Puri wins Best Talk award at Student Conference on Conservation Science – New York

By | October 14th, 2021|biodiversity, conservation, graduate students, India, interdisciplinary, TCD|

Congratulations to Mahi Puri for winning the prestigious Best Talk award at the Student Conference on Conservation Science - New York hosted by the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, American Museum of Natural History.  The meeting was held virtually from 5-8 October, 2021.  Her talk was entitled "An integrated approach to prioritize carnivore conservation in [...]

Hot off the Press! Mountain passes are higher in the tropics!

By | July 25th, 2021|Uncategorized|

Congratulations to Dr. Flavia Montaño-Centellas (flamontano [at] gmail [dot] com) for her new publication in Journal of Biogeography.  Using datasets from montane gradients across the globe, Flavia tests Dan Janzen's idea regarding "Why mountain passes are higher in the tropics" (American Naturalist, 1967) using multiple analyses of bird diversity across latitudinal gradients.  The study concludes [...]

Introducing Dr. Mahi Puri !!

By | June 30th, 2021|conservation, ecology, graduate students, India, TCD, WEC|

Mahi Puri successfully defended her PhD dissertation on Monday, June 28th in the Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation at the University of Florida.  Her dissertation "Prioritizing and Identifying Opportunities for Carnivore Conservation in Human-dominated Landscapes of India" examined three main objectives: "1) determining habitat-use patterns for 4 carnivores (tiger, leopard, [...]

Mahi Puri wins ESA’s Murray F. Buell Award

By | April 6th, 2021|biodiversity, conservation, graduate students, India, interdisciplinary, research|

Mahi Puri, PhD candidate in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation won the outstanding oral presentation by a graduate student at the 2020 Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting.  There she presented her work entitled "The balancing act: maintaining leopard-prey equilibrium could offer economic benefits to people in a shared forest landscape of central India".  Mahi has long [...]

New study points to conserving pine forests as key to conserving Bahama Oriole

By | March 16th, 2021|birds, conservation, graduate students, SNRE, TCD|

Rick Stanley, PhD student in UF's Interdisciplinary Ecology program and TCD program recently published a new paper that identifies native pine forests as key to conserving the highly endangered Bahama Oriole on Andros Island in the Bahamas.  Contrary to "conventional wisdom", this study discovered that the Bahama Oriole was in fact more abundant than originally expected. [...]

Untangling what drives avian community assembly in the Andes

By | February 12th, 2021|Andes, biodiversity, birds, Bolivia, ecology|

Flavia Montaño-Centellas with co-authors Bette Loiselle and Morgan Tingley have published a new paper in Ecography that examines the role of abiotic filtering and biological interactions in explaining bird community assemblages along an extensive elevational gradient in Bolivia.  This paper results from Flavia's PhD research support the hypothesis of abiotic filtering as a primary driver [...]