On 18 April, Bette got a chance to travel to Fort Myers, Florida in Lee County to participate in a fun-filled bird day hosted by University of Florida Extension. The event had over 50 amateur bird enthusiasts that had spent much of 17 April looking at shorebirds at several birding hotspots in the area. Bette [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation has a new tenure-track position open for an Assistant Professor in Global Change Ecology. We are looking for someone to develop an internationally recognized research program related to global change impacts on wildlife and biodiversity. The individual would be expected to: 1) teach an innovative, state-of-the-art undergraduate course [...]
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 [...]
Ecuador's Ambassador to the United States Nathalie Cely visited the University of Florida on 28-29 March. She met with faculty from the Center for Latin American Studies on Thursday afternoon, as well as Ecuadorian graduate students from across campus. Students from the Loiselle and Blake labs, and other students in UF's Tropical Conservation and Development [...]
Are host-parasite systems more specialized in the tropics than in the temperate zones? We asked this question using community-wide data on avian malaria parasites in the Ecuadorean Amazon and in the Ozarks. In both systems we found that host-parasite were highly specialized, much more so than expected by chance. Tropical birds also tended to have [...]
Congratulations to PhD student Flavia Montano for receiving a grant worth ~$750 from IDEA WILD. Flavia came to UF from Bolivia and is currently in her second year in the Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation. She is interested in examining how species and functional diversity change along environmental gradients. Her grant from IDEA WILD will provide some critical [...]
Oscar Gonzalez was recently awarded the "Doris Lowe and Earl and Verna Lowe Scholarship" from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at the University of Florida. This competitive award is based on "merit and potential for contribution to the agricultural and wildlife environment". More about this and other CALS awards can be found here. [...]
Near Tarapoto, Peru, a private company is clearing rain forests to establish a heart-of-palm plantation. The company is interested in mitigating the impacts to biological diversity and has planned to leave 25 m buffers around existing streams and wetland areas. Farah Carrasco Rueda is a PhD student in SNRE and TCD and a Peruvian national. She [...]
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