UF undergrad Rosy Padron is conducting an internship with the Public Affairs Section at the US Embassy in Quito, Ecuador. She has just arrived and is getting to know Quito. Stay tuned to hear updates from Rosy as she explores Quito, works with the embassy and later heads to the Amazon. The Loiselle lab is [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I had the distinct privilege of co-teaching The Amazon seminar with Dr. Marianne Schmink in Fall 2015 - what a great experience! Marianne has been teaching this foundation inter-disciplinary seminar since 1981 when she first taught the course with Drs. Charles Wagley and Chuck Wood. This fall we had 16 fabulous students and several faculty [...]
Congratulations to Hernan Alvarez who successfully defended his M. Sc. thesis on 2 November and turned in his thesis on 2 December 2015. His thesis, entitled "Perceptions, participation, and success in two community-based programs in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon", examined stakeholder responses to two environmental monitoring programs in the Amazon. Hernan is back in Ecuador [...]
Many "Gators", present and past, participated at the Andes Amazon Biodiversity Conservation BIOCONPERU from 15-18 October 2015. Farah Carrasco helped in the organization and running of the conference, while Rodrigo Medellin, Alfonso Alonso, and Bette Loiselle provided two of the plenary lectures.
Our new paper, Enigmatic declines in bird numbers in lowland forest of eastern Ecuador may be a consequence of climate change, reports on widespread declines in bird populations across species within a largely undisturbed forest of western Amazonia. Populations varied but were largely stable until recent years when both species found in understory and canopy [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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