From 9-13 May, Bette spent one glorious week talking about seed dispersal at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center under the excellent leadership of a dynamic trio of young women scientists: Noelle Beckman (SESYNC), Clare Aslan NAU) and Haldre Rogers (Iowa State University). This team had assembled a stellar cast of empirical, mathematical and theoretical biologists together [...]
Wrapping up a two week visit with colleagues Marco Pizo and Cesar Cestari as part of our Science without Borders grant investigating the integration of sexual selection and optimal foraging using white-bearded manakin (Manacus manacus) as a model. We managed to submit two articles in the past few days about this work and have plans [...]
Well besides the fact it could be in better focus! I am back in Brazil visiting my colleagues Cesar Cestari and Marco Pizo at UNESP in Rio Claro. Sunday morning we headed to the local 'natural' area where there are stands of Eucalyptus (30 yr old, 100 yr old), lots of Euterpe palms (an exotic [...]
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!
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 [...]
Congratulations to PhD candidate Oscar Gonzalez from Peru who will receive a World Wildlife Fund Russell E. Train Education for Nature Fellowship for Fall 2015, his final semester at UF. Oscar's research has centered around birds in high elevation forests of the Peruvian Andes. His dissertation works explores the interactions between birds and flowering plants [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Recent Comments