Gorgeous sunrises and sunsets are part of the routine of field work at the Hopland Research and Extension Center in 2017. With the support of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW), Justin, Kaitlyn (Ph.D. Candidate) and I have just begun putting GPS collars on deer, whose “crepuscular” behavior makes them most active at dawn and dusk.
These collars provide three streams of information: GPS locations every hour for the next 6 months, GPS locations every 5 seconds for the next month, and data from an accelerometer – more or less a Fitbit for deer – 50 times a second for the next month. Each of these datasets provides unique information on deer movement, resource use, decision-making, fear, and risk. Together, these data help support CDFW efforts to improve deer management and population estimation as well as lab interests in behavior, population dynamics, and species interactions.
And when the rain dries up, the views aren’t too bad either.
A symposium, entitled “Conservation and Storytelling in a Post-Truth World,” will aim to expand on these two topics (conservation and storytelling) and broaden the personnel that have been typical of the conference in previous years. A diverse group of speakers from three continents will share their experiences of how storytelling and conservation fit together. Stories have helped broadcast conservation messages beyond academic enclaves; they have helped scientists and practitioners grapple with difficult questions; and finally, as some of our non-academic speakers will share, stories play a major role in shaping landscapes themselves, and thus are more vital than ever to conservationists’ toolkits. Lab leaders Lauren and Alex (Ph.D. Candidates) and a creative team of B-Labmates are organizing this forward-thinking symposium.
The workshop will explain methods and applications of risk models and maps like this one from Miller 2015, showing the likeliness of tiger depredation on livestock.
Jennie (Postdoctoral Scholar) will lead the lab’s second event, a workshop on “Risk Modeling as a Decision-Making Tool for Reducing Human-Wildlife Conflict”. A major challenge in wildlife conservation globally is identifying priority human-wildlife conflict sites where mitigation efforts will be most effective. Spatial risk modeling recently emerged as a tool for understanding, predicting and mapping hotspots of human-wildlife conflict, such as livestock depredation, crop raiding and attacks on people. This workshop will present the methods and applications of spatial risk modeling as a decision-making tool for informing the implementation of conflict mitigation techniques. Jennie will share case studies from India, Mexico and more so look out for tigers, lions and bears!
More information on these events will be posted on the conference website sometime soon. We hope to see you in Cartagena in July!
Check out the media coverage of our lab’s article “War and wildlife: linking armed conflict to conservation”, published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment in December!
Articles:
Frontiers Focus: “Armed conflict catches animals in the crossfire”
UC Berkeley press release: “Institutional collapse, not guns and bombs, is most-cited cause of wildlife declines from war”
A hearty congratulations to our postdoc Dr. Paul Elsen for winning the ICCB Student Awards Competition in Montpellier, France this summer! Paul presented a talk entitled “Global Mountain Topography and the Fate of Montane Species under Climate Change”. His talk featured a global analysis of mountain range topography to illustrate that not all mountains are shaped like pyramids, but that there is actually a diversity of shapes. Read more
Our group’s work in Carrizo Plain National Monument, a semi-arid grassland ecosystem 100 miles northwest of Los Angeles, was highlighted in the Washington Post last week in a conversation about the cascading effects of California’s drought on native wildlife. In particular, the article focuses on the effects of Carrizo’s gradual conversion from grassland to desert on the Endangered and charismatic Giant kangaroo rat, Dipodomys ingens. Brashares was subsequently interviewed about these drought effects by Alex Wagner on MSNBC and Peter O’Dowd on Here and Now. Read more
At ESPM’s Graduation Festival on May 8th, Professor Brashares was awarded the department’s Faculty Mentor Award, given each year to a faculty member who demonstrates outstanding commitment to mentoring and helping graduate and undergraduate students succeed. Read more
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