The Forest Animal Ecology Lab will be moving over to the Department of Forest Engineering, Resources, and Management within the College of Forestry at OSU in September. We are excited about being a part of the FERM community and continuing to expand our research in managed forests.
The FAEL lab has added two more full-time members to work on the Oregon Marbled Murrelet Project; Jon Dachenhaus and Ethan Woodis. Both come with a wealth of experience in a variety of challening field settings and have spent a substantial amount of time on the project as seasonal technicians, making them ideally suited for the project. Welcome to you both!
The Forest Animal Ecology Lab is hiring, with 26 positions available for field work in summer 2019. Details can be found on the Join the Lab page.
The Oregon Marbled Murrelet Project just got chronicled in the fall issue of Audubon magazine! Writer Juliet Grable did a fantastic job weaving a story that focuses on the challenges of working with this threatened species that nicely complimented outstanding images from Newport, OR area photographer Jaymi Heimbuch. Check out the story here.
We have 4 new people joining the FAEL: Marie-Sophie Garcia-Heras is a new postdoc working on Marbled Murrelets, Rachel Zitomer is an incoming M.S. student focused on pollinators and forest management, Nicole Bell is an Honors College student examining pollen use by bees in burned areas, and Kendra Del Toro is an URSA Engage undergraduate awardee who is quantifying bee survival relative to wildfire severity. Welcome all!
Jim and colleagues received a $1M grant to study the health of pollinators inhabitating intensively managed conifer forests. This work is funded by USDA-NIFA and will allow for the first comprehensive examination of the key pollinator groups in managed conifer forests of the Pacific Northwest. See the official OSU press release here.
Jim received funding from the College of Forestry to initate a study of the breeding ecology of the Black-backed Woodpecker in burned and unburned forests of southern Oregon. For reasons currently unknown, this species uses unburned forest for nesting in Oregon, a pattern that differs from other parts of its range in the western U.S. This work is being undertaken with co-PI Jake Verschuyl at NCASI and will get started in late spring 2018.
Janel did a great job presenting her theis project on Black-capped Chickadee use of supplemental bird feeders and was successful in her thesis defense. She had the at-capacity audience riveted by the wide variation in feeder use by birds and the surprising finding that handicapped birds were minimally impacted by feather-clipping. Wait to go Janel!
Our work examining the response of native bees to wildfire at the Douglas Fire Complex was recently highlighted by OPB. The story does a nice job summing up the lack of information regarding native pollinators in forested ecosystems and the need for additional research on this topic, particularly studies that assess links between managed forests and agricultural areas. Check out the full story here.
Jenn Guerrero was recently selected as an OMSI Science Communication Fellow. As part of this program, she will expand her skillset to more effectively communicate scientific concepts with a high degree of complexity to stakeholders on the Oregon Marbled Murrelet Project. Congrats Jenn!