Tag Archives: collaboration

2013 Field Crew Advertisements are now posted

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I’ve started posting the job advertisement for our field crew for the 2013 sage-grouse season. We’re looking for 4-5 experienced, motivated, easy-to-live-with assistants to help with our research next season. It should be a fun year- we will hopefully have some encounternet tags to test (next-gen telemetry tags with gps and accelerometers made by our collaborator John Burt), and also likely have multi-robot behavior experiments on the docket.

I’m posting it in the “normal” places (Texas A&M Widlife Job Board, OSNA Job board, Society for Conservation Biology, and Animal Behavior Society- stay tuned for this as they are apparently having problems with their board). There’s a new forum-type board for bird jobs on the Ornithology Exchange- I may try that as well, although it looks fairly redundant with the OSNA job board (at least for our purposes- unfortunately we  can only take US citizens or legal residents and the Ornithology Exchange features a lot of international societies).

Here’s the ad!

FIELD ASSISTANTS (4-5) needed approximately March 3 – May 5 for investigations of the behavior and ecology of Greater Sage-Grouse near Lander, Wyoming and the scenic Wind River Range.  The projects are part of a larger effort in Prof. Gail Patricelli’s lab at UC Davis to understand how sexual selection and environmental acoustics shape sage-grouse display behaviors- see the following websites for more information (http://www.eve.ucdavis.edu/gpatricelli/) and (http://www.alankrakauer.org). Assistants will use video and audio recording technology to support an NSF-funded study of courtship dynamics and display plasticity on the lek. Duties include maintaining camera and acoustic monitoring equipment, observation of basic courtship behavior and lek counts, GPS surveying, habitat characterization, assisting in the capture of adult sage-grouse, data entry, and some computer and video analysis. Assistants must be flexible in their needs and comfortable living and working in close quarters in a remote field station, and able to work in adverse field conditions (mainly MUD and COLD).  Work will be daily and primarily early in the morning, with afternoon and night work required as well.  Applicants must have a valid driver’s license, basic computer skills, and have participated in at least one field biology project in the past. Wilderness First Aid or First Responder, and previous experience/certification with off-road driving and/or ATV’s is preferred but not required. Must be able to show proof of United States employment eligibility. Assistants will receive a total stipend of $1200 plus room and board, but need to provide their own transportation to Lander and their own personal gear.  Please send a cover letter, resume, and contact info for two (2) references to: Alan Krakauer, Department of Evolution and Ecology, University of California Davis, One Shields Avenue, 2320 Storer Hall, Davis, CA 95616, or preferably by email to ahkrakauer [at] ucdavis.edu.  The positions will remain open until filled, and review of applications will begin immediately.

 

I’ve been pretty busy with teaching over the past month, but hope to have some more research-related updates soon.

NAOC 2012 Recap

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View from UBC

I’m back from Vancouver and the great joint meeting of many ornithological societies. Although there were a few issues, it was, all in all, a great meeting. The venue was beautiful; the University of British Columbia is perched on the end of a peninsula, with stunning views of water, mountains, and downtown Vancouver. The weather was pretty incredible as well: sunny and warm for most of the conference.

 

We had a packed schedule for the four-day meeting. We started at 8:30 with plenary talks from well-known biologists. In the opening plenary, Fiona Schmiegelow gave an overview of research on boreal songbird conservation. Unfortunately I missed the second plenary by Irby Lovette, but the last two were excellent: Roxanna Torres from UNAM led us through 20 years of research on color signaling in Blue-footed Boobies, and Peter Marra from the Smithsonian gave an impassioned plea for the importance of studying winter behavior in migrant birds, and the importance of linking breeding, migration, and wintering ecology.

The talks were all really high quality, not like it was 15 years ago when people were still transitioning into Powerpoint and presentations were still a mix of slides, overheads, and computer. There were 10(!) concurrent sessions, so at times it was a hard choice of which talk to attend. I think the ISBE meetings in Sweden drew away some of the bird song and behavior people. That said, I still saw a number of great talks on sexual selection, bird song, noise impacts, acoustic monitoring, genomics, life history trade-offs, color, and a number of other topics. Sometimes the most unusual talks are the ones that are most memorable- in this case I might give the award to the talk by Mu-Chun Yao (National Tawain University) on how the endangered Fairy Pitta uses monkey poo as a predator deterrent on its nest.

At 5PM, the talks ended and the poster sessions began. The room was fairly spacious for two hundred posters and hundreds of presenters and browsers, although some nights it was on the warm side. I felt pretty good about the response to our poster on lateral biases in sage-grouse behaviors- I was talking to people about it for the entire session on both nights my poster was up. I was hoping someone who specialized in brain asymmetry or behavioral lateralization might stop by to offer criticism or advice on publishing, but unfortunately that didn’t happen. It’s really hard to see every poster even when you aren’t standing their explaining your own, so I’m not terribly surprised.

A real highlight of the meeting was the Bird Band Jam- basically a concert at a local bar featuring several talented musicians from the conference.  I missed the first act, but caught a solo guitarist singing comical songs about birds and birding, then a wonderful sequence of bluegrass/Americana tunes that started with one group and slowly morphed over the course of several songs into another group. The night was capped by a more contemporary rock band that certainly got an A for effort. This was the first time I’ve seen this at a bird meeting (I know Ecological Society of America has something similar), and I think the consensus was to repeat this event in the future.

Closing Banquet in the Anthropology Museum

Meetings are always a good place to start up collaborations, and this one seemed particularly fruitful. I don’t know that I have anything to report right now but hopefully my conversations may have sparked a few projects that I will report on once they get a little closer to being concrete.

 

 

 

Meetings are also a good chance to catch up with old friends. I was pleased to run into four of my former sage-grouse assistants, including Conor Taff (now in our lab), Megan Jones (Florida State), Eli Rose (N.C. State), and the biggest blast from the past Jennifer Sheppard (U. Saskatchewan). I hadn’t seen Jenn since 2006 when she was part of our very first field crew in Wyoming. At that time she hadn’t even completed her undergraduate degree, so it was great to see her doing great work as a full fledged graduate student! I also got to see several former Acorn Woodpecker and Western Bluebird assistants from Hastings. Danika Kleiber is now in graduate school at UBC, and took Sarah Knutie, Lauryn Benedict and I to a waterfowl park south of Vancouver. We enjoyed getting EXTREMELY close looks at some neat birds like Cackling Goose and Sandhill Crane, which clearly warranted a celebratory fresh blueberry smoothie from a blueberry farm on the way back to Vancouver.

And again, congrats to Conor and Jim for their awards!

NSF grant in, NAOC poster done

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A brief mid-summer update- it has been a busy few weeks after getting back from my Wyoming/Colorado trip at the beginning of July. Aside from the usual manuscript reviews and progress on our own manuscripts, a couple of noteworthy things to check off:

Gail, Anna, and I submitted our latest NSF grant that would fund another 3 years of work on the sage-grouse. We brought on another collaborator: Jennifer Forbey is a professor at Boise State University in Idaho, and is an expert in herbivore/plant dynamics, particularly the importance of nutritional content and plant-produced toxins. With Jennifer on board, we will have a much stronger foraging component to our examination of off-lek behaviors of the grouse (in other words, what they are doing the other 20 hours of the day when they are not courting and fighting on the lek ). I feel like I usually do after writing one of these: exhausted but excited.

I also just finished making a poster for the North American Ornithological Congress meeting next week in Vancouver. I’ll be presenting some new analyses on the lateralization in behavior. Last year I presented on a similar topic at the Animal Behavior meetings, but I didn’t have much time to put together something (I was originally going to present our mechanical sound (i.e. “swish” project), but Becca was able to present this work herself, so I switched to the lateral bias analysis at the moment. This year it was still a rush, but I think we ended up with analyses that better link the existing literature on lateral biases to our own data, and hopefully have results that are pretty close to what will end up in the eventual publications.

The second Summer Session started this week in Davis, so I’m meeting with a few new prospective undergraduate researchers. We’ve made a lot of progress so far this summer- we’ve almost finished measuring mating success from our 2012 Chugwater Lek tapes and have started the Monument Lek mating success tapes. Marty, our summer program intern, has even gotten into the 2012 robot experiment tapes. It’s never good practice to get too excited over preliminary results from partially-collected data, but it does look really encouraging so far (his data look at whether males treated the “coy/disinterested” and “interested” behaviors of the fembot differently). We are also almost done with a sample of display behavior measures from the 2011 season- this will add to our understanding of males who were tested in the “environmental responsiveness” playback experiment in 2011.

CCSF Talk in November

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Besides teaching Intro to Evolution for the first time, I will have a few other things on my plate for this fall. The first one that’s actually been scheduled is a talk at City College of San Francisco. The CCSF Department of Biology has a long-running seminar series that is open to the public (note the fall schedule is not yet posted). The talk will be November 16, and I’ll be talking about wild turkeys instead of sage-grouse for a change. Appropriate for the week before Thanksgiving I guess!

I am hoping to arrange a local Audubon Society talk as well- I’ll post more about that as soon as I have any details. And my former colleagues at Berkeley (Sam Diaz-Muñoz, Emily DuVal, and Eileen Lacey) are threatening to write a review paper, and in the Patricelli Lab we will continue to forward on a number of sage-grouse projects. It should be enough to keep me busy!

RMBL

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I recently had the chance to visit one of the premier field research stations in the world, the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab. RMBL is located in the old town of Gothic above Crested Butte, Colorado, well over 9000 feet up in the Rockies. RMBL boasts one of the longest running sites for remote research in North America, and hosts a large number of researchers studying many different aspects of high elevation ecology.

We were there for the opening of their new research building, the Gothic Research Center. I had a personal connection to this event, as my uncle John helped fund the construction of this building in honor of my cousin Keith who passed away a few years ago. Keith had spent several summers as a field technician there, and RMBL became one of his favorite places. His interactions and experiences at RMBL led him to pursue graduate work in biology. We felt this was a great way to honor Keith’s memory, and were thrilled to hear how excited the research staff was to take advantage of the new building.

photo L. La Pointe

Looking for marmots among rocky outcroppings in meadows and slopes

The next morning, Dan Blumstein let us tag along so we could see more of the area around RMBL. Dan studies yellow-bellied marmots, and was checking various far flung colonies to see whether any marmots were inhabiting them this year. It was kind of a down year for the marmots, so some of the previously-inhabited areas were no longer inhabited. Dan is interested in the metapopulation dynamics- for example how long do these populations persist, and how often are these sites recolonized by new animals? (Dan is interested in a lot of other things too in the realms of evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and conservation, including sensor arrays, and we’ve actually collaborated on a paper that came out of an NSF-funded workshop that he organized.) Dan’s free program JWatcher is a very useful tool for quantifying behavior from video records of animal behavior.