In recognition of her achievements and work on avian species including the imperiled Pinyon Jay, Emily Macklin was awarded the 2023 Kennith H. Husmann Memorial Scholarship from the South Dakota Ornithologists Union. She will be presenting the early findings of her research to the union in Fall 2023.
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Kaylee Boland was awarded the 2023-2024 CAFES Undergraduate Research Award for the fall 2023 semester to support her work on characterizing daytime resting location use by New England cottontails. Kaylee will be attending and presenting her work at the upcoming The Wildlife Society Meeting in Louisville, KY in November 2023!
The Colorado Birding Challenge is a fun, county-based birding and conservation event held during the most exciting time of the birding year. Each May several billion birds migrate into and through the United States and begin to establish their breeding territories. The Challenge was created to provide support for specific bird conservation projects. This year's we are grateful that the challenge has elected to support our work on the determination of breeding colony locations and the critical surrounding habitat for Pinyon Jays! Pinyon Jays are one of the most recognizable and enigmatic species of the pinon-juniper woodlands of Colorado and the west, but they are also rapidly declining and poorly known. The species has declined approximately 75% since 1970 and was petitioned for Endangered Species Act listing in April 2022. The causes of decline are poorly understood, but likely involve a combination of declining/dying pinon- juniper woodlands owing to climate change, reduced pinon pine mast production, changing woodland conditions (a shift to dense woodlands), direct woodland loss to fire, and woodland management that alters woodland age structure and tree density to levels that jays may not prefer. The direct and indirect effects of these threats on Pinyon Jays is poorly understood. The new Pinyon Jay research starting in Colorado, led by the Bureau of Land Management and South Dakota State University in collaboration with Colorado Parks and Wildlife and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is designed to assess habitat use and locate nest colony sites across the Royal Gorge BLM District. The project will assess questions about the effects of woodland management and woodland condition (e.g., tree density, health, etc.) on Pinyon Jays. This research is critical to providing science- based information on Pinyon Jays that can be incorporated into future pinon-juniper woodland management across the region. The 2023 COBC will support this important research on an imperiled species." Want to find out more about CFO's 3rd annual Colorado Birding Challenge (coming up on May 20th!) and how your team and you can make a difference for Pinyon Jays? Visit: https://cobirds.org/cobc/ New research reveals that traditional management efforts for New England cottontail, which relied on the best available science, may actually be thwarting their recovery Wildlife conservation is frequently limited by an incomplete understanding of how animals interact and respond to native ecosystems--a limitation that is only further challenged by the many novel factors, like invasive species or habitat fragmentation, that alter the way in which species interact with their environment. Although it is in the best interests of threatened species for us to thoroughly investigate these relationships, obtaining specific information is often difficult due to cost, low population size, lack of technology, or the evasiveness of the species in question. In these circumstances, we rely heavily on what information we do have; though it may be incomplete, applicable across only a narrow environmental niche, or unable to account for critical changes to the environment from, for example, the introduction of new competitor or spread of invasive plants. Many wildlife species live in patchy habitats. Animals move between patches frequently or not, but connectivity among patches is maintained and populations persist. Occasionally a bad year, disaster, or just bad luck wipes out all individuals in a patch but new individuals eventually find it, move in and the system remains stable. These systems are generally referred to as metapopulations and many species have existed in stable metapopulations for millions of years. However, today, the connections between the individual patches making up a metpopulation are increasingly fragmented by roads, human development, or otherwise altered habitats. As a result, metapopulations may be fragmented into multiple, smaller parts and their individual patches may more frequently blink out and it may take longer for them to be recolonized-or they may never be recolonized. The end result is population declines as individual patches are lost but never recolonized leading to an increased susceptibility to permanent metapopulation extinction. Recent research led by Dr. Amanda Cheeseman of SUNY-ESF suggests that this scenario is occurring in even the most secure populations of New England cottontails raising concerns for the status and long term stability of populations in New York and across their range. Her work, recently published in Conservation Genetics builds off of a rich literature suggesting that populations of New England cottontails are highly susceptible to metapopulation breakdown as a result of habitat loss and poor connectivity among remnant populations. Her findings suggest that a habitat loss and fragmentation by roads in New York have created a patchwork of unsustainably small populations, each displaying indicators of decreased genetic diversity. Restoring connectivity among fragmented metapopulations in an effort to increase population size to sustainable levels should be a priority for managers. A combination of habitat creation, a focus on creating wildlife corridors, and translocation and reintroduction efforts may be necessary to achieve these goals. Canid Camera has been a "side project" of mine since the early years of my PhD. I say "side project" in quotes because, as those who are fond of these projects know, there really is no such thing. I spent years studiously setting and maintaining an array of about 50 cameras across the lower Hudson Valley to help examine shrubland quality in the region. By the end of my PhD, the end of the trail camera setting was nowhere in site, but I had amassed hundreds of thousands of photos and could no longer keep up with identifying the wildlife in them on my own. In 2017 I decided to put Canid Camera on the Zooniverse. I had seen a presentation by a Zooniverse co-creator at a conference and was enthralled. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to handle the massive amounts of data that were coming in and to engage the public in young forest conservation, a hot issue out here in New York. On the surface these shrublands look like a mess a relict of their creation through natural or anthropogenic destruction. But spend some time in them and they are beautiful. Their depths are rarely visited by humans and they are truly wild, full of youth and a vibrancy that is lacking among older forests. Their diversity of plants, insects, birds, and mammals is unmatched. In short, I have grown to love them and wanted to share them and their diversity with the world, and in posting to Zooniverse I would having help identifying the wildlife- it was a no-brainer, and I couldn't wait to get started. I found an excellent team of undergraduates to help put together the site... and we launched April 20, 2018. Canid Camera took on a life of it's own. We had over 125,000 photos identified the first week, and over 3,000 comments. Fast forward nearly a year and all of our photos were identified. We were on to Season 2 and (spoiler) we are featured in the New York Times! Working on Canid Camera has been a wonderful experience, (A+ side project) and I am so grateful to have worked with so many fantastic undergraduate students and folks participating in the project as we work toward creating thriving forests for wildlife. |
AuthorAmanda is an Assistant Professor at South Dakota Sate University. Her research focuses on conservation and management of wildlife and their habitats Archives
October 2023
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