Kathi Borgmann reports on declining birds in tropical forests of the Americas in a recent article in Living Bird. She highlights our work in Ecuador, as well as long-term studies in Panama and Brazil. The story is also enriched by reports by Geovanny Rivadeneyra, a naturalist and guide from the Indigenous Kichwa community of Añangu who has [...]
Congratulations to Flavia Montaño-Centellas for her new paper with colleagues Lia Nahomi Kajiki, Giselle Mangini, Gabriel Colorado and María Elisa Fanjul that explores mixed-species bird flocks along elevational, latitudinal, and human disturbance gradients in the Neotropics. This paper results from a special symposium entitled "Mixed-species flocks of birds: ecology and evolution" at the XII [...]
The School of Natural Resources and Environment is hosting a seminar on Monday, March 12, 2018, 1:55PM-2:45PM in 112 Newins-Ziegler Hall. Farah Carrasco-Rueda, Ph.D. candidate and UFBI Fellow, will present “Landuse change and biodiversity: understanding patterns, driving mechanisms and impacts of mitigation.” Farah’s dissertation work is focused on the effects of landuse cover change on diversity, using bats [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
PhD Student Farah Carrasco's work with Dr. Tremaine Gregory from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute showed that > 20 mammal species used natural canopy bridges to cross over linear clearings resulting from natural gas pipelines in the Peruvian rain forests. The article published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution (Vol. 5: 443, 2014) was recent [...]
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