Submitted by Luke Macaulay on

Project Description: 

The Macaulay and Bartolome Labs are seeking several undergraduate research assistants to assist with a variety of projects spanning ecological to policy and economics-oriented topics.  We are flexible and able to accommodate students working on projects that best fit their interests and future career goals.  The projects include:

  1. An Evaluation of State Incentive Programs for Habitat Management on Private Land: This project seeks to compare various state policy mechanisms that incentivize habitat conservation and improvement on private land and identify innovative strategies as well as strengths and weaknesses of various approaches to this issue.  The analysis performs a review of various state policies for these types of incentive programs and will attempt to classify the various programs at a broad level. Further analysis will involve interviewing participants and/or implementers of these programs to determine what aspects of these programs work effectively or not.  We seek to present a preliminary review of these programs and identify best practices that other state policy-makers may want to consider implementing. Finally, this preliminary research will seek to develop a strategy for more intensive research and analysis in the future.
  2. Updating statewide ownership map and ongoing research and outreach associated with land fragmentation in California.  The ownership map is a base layer used in callands.ucanr.edu as well as previous research publication and another publication currently in development and a connectivity corridor research project that a grant proposal has been submitted for.
  3. A five-year project evaluating the impacts of cattle grazing and feral pig activity on riparian areas on the 270,000-acre Tejon Ranch in southern California.  This project has a botanical dataset from 2018 that needs to be entered into a database. This project could lead to the potential of a senior thesis looking at riparian wildlife occurrence in a record drought period as well as feeding into state & transition models for publications that are currently in progress.
  4. A related project is the analysis of five years of riparian bird surveys conducted by the Tejon Ranch Conservancy.  Project goals are to determine relationships between riparian breeding bird density and habitat characteristics on the ranch.  This project will require checking data for errors, producing summary statistics, remote sensing to classify vegetation cover, and eventually using statistical models to evaluate relationships between bird population density and riparian habitat characteristics.  Student involvement could be in any of these areas, depending on interests and prior skills.  Results from this analysis will help guide future conservation activities on the 270,000-acre ranch.

Additional opportunities for research will likely arise throughout the semester, including potential assistance on projects involving rangeland ecology, geospatial analysis, and ranch economics.

Department: 
ESPM
Undergraduate's Role: 

Please see above.

Undergraduate's Qualifications: 
  • Interest in learning about research and publication processes.
  • Interest in rangeland ecology, wildlife, policies that impact conservation, land tenure and ownership.
  • Ability to pay close attention to detail.  
  • For projects 1 and 2, ability to communicate effectively on the phone and via email.
  • Careful data entry and analysis are of most importance rather than speed. Students will gain a working knowledge of data entry and manipulation in Excel, and depending on prior skills and interests, may also use ArcGIS and R for analysis and generating summary statistics.
Location: 
On Campus
Hours: 
3-6 hours
Project URL: 
macaulaylab.berkeley.edu/research