Well, where did summer 2015 go? The semester starts tomorrow and the lab is heading back from all kinds of places - Peruvian Amazon, Bolivian Andes, Peruvian Andes, Ecuador Amazon, among others. We welcome new PhD student Michael Esbach who spent his summer in the Solomon Islands, and in western Amazonia (Ecuador). Looking forward to [...]
Congratulations to Dr. Gonzalo Rivas for receiving his PhD degree at UF's graduation ceremony on 7 August 2015 at the O'Connell Center. Gonzalo, pictured here with UF President Kent Fuchs, will soon start an assistant professor position at Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador. There he will continue his ecological research in the Amazon [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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