Nate is a Ph.D. student. His research combines aspects of animal behavior, trophic and community ecology, plant-animal interactions, landscape ecology and biogeography. He’s particularly interested in how spatial and temporal structure in the environment affects interspecific interactions and ecosystem processes, and how human land-use decisions affect these relationships. As an undergraduate, he studied the effects of territoriality on male mating calls in field crickets, and his master’s thesis focused on the biogeography of vascular plants and small mammals in urban forest fragments in Portland, Oregon. Currently, he is combining radio telemetry studies, behavioral observations, exclosure experiments, and computer modeling to study the spatial ecology of acorn dispersal by Blue Jays (Cyanocitta cristata) and tree squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis, S. niger) in the Central Hardwoods. Eventually, this work will be applied to understanding and overcoming barriers to natural oak regeneration in fragmented agro-forest ecosystems. He’s also helping Byju and Bryan with the acorn weevil project and collecting baseline seed production and removal data for the Indiana Hardwood Ecosystems Experiment, a long-term project studying the ecological and social effects of forest management. In the past, he has worked as a biomedical research technician, a veterinary assistant, and an endangered species ecologist, and he maintains a strong interest in applied conservation and environmental policy.

Bryan Price

Bryan joined the Swihart research group in February 2005 as a Research Technician. He earned a B.S. in Microbiology and M.S. in Entomology from the University of Kentucky . His thesis research dealt with the control of stored grain beetles with Bacillus thuringiensis . Prior to his arrival at Purdue, Bryan worked in the Stored Grain Insect Management and Ecology Laboratory at Kentucky State University for 13 years. He is currently working with Byju Govindan, examining the metapopulation dynamics of the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum . Bryan is also assisting in the investigation of spatio-temporal dynamics of acorn weevils ( Curculio and Conotrachelus spp .) in west-central Indiana forest patches. In addition to insect population ecology, he maintains an interest in stored product entomology as well as invasive species control. In his seemingly elusive free time, he thoroughly enjoys family history research as well as photography, travel and other varied pursuits. Bryan and his wife Pam live in Indianapolis and will celebrate their fifth anniversary in September of 2006.
Price Vita

 

Carol Rizkalla

Carol's research interests in conservation biology are diverse. Her interests in captive breeding related to reintroduction programs led her to zoo biology at Disney. She also is interested in all aspects of research on charismatic megafauna (yes, elephants) and herpetofauna. She currently is directing her energy toward investigating charismatic small-mammal fauna, specifically, their ability to disperse through a heterogeneous matrix. Her research will use experimental translocations to examine whether white-footed mice (Peromyscus leucopus), eastern chipmunks (Tamias striatus), and southern flying squirrels (Glaucomys volans) require wooded fencerows to move between forest patches, and the extent to which their movements are affected by habitat fragmentation. Information gained from her translocation studies will be combined with other data sets to conduct ecological risk assessments for potential land-use planning scenarios in agricultural landscapes.

Rizkalla Vita

Natasha Urban

Natasha is a M.S. student.  She is studying the effects of forest management on bird and small mammal occupancy patterns in central hardwood forests of southern Indiana.  Natasha’s primary field site is the naval base at Crane, IN, where she is sampling a chronosequence of group selection cuts, categorized by time since harvest and aspect.  She also is participating in sampling of small mammals at Morgan-Monroe and Yellowwood State Forests as part of the Hardwood Ecosystem Experiment .

Former doctoral student Anthony J. DeNicola is president of White Buffalo, in Moodus , CT , a nonprofit wildlife management and research organization dedicated to conserving native species and ecosystems through damage and population control.  This photo was taken on Santa Cruz Island while conducting a feral pig eradication program.  Also pictured is hall-of-fame hog dog, Punga (now deceased).

Phone: 860-873-2782
Email: wbuffaloinc@aol.com
Web: http://www.whitebuffaloinc.org/default.htm

 

Dr. Yssa Dawn DeWoody

Yssa's research interests range from community and landscape ecology to genetic modeling. In particular, she is interested in the stability – diversity debate which asserts that diverse communities are more stable. We have investigated this hypothesis within a single trophic level structured by asymmetric competition and plan to expand this research to include multiple trophic levels. Yssa also is interested in utilizing and expanding existing metapopulation models to study questions associated with landscape structure and change in terms of their consequences for species persistence. She hopes to take advantage of the general nature of the metapopulation model to explore possible applications to genetic modeling.

Yssa's other interests include playing with her three beautiful daughters, jogging and cooking.
DeWoody Vita

 

 

Ben Dolan is a community ecologist whose research focuses around applied aspects of forest ecology. His research has investigated plant community ecology, fragmentation ecology, and disturbance ecology, and he has worked to develop an ecological classification system for east-central Indiana . He has a keen interest in learning how different disturbances within particular ecological land-types can be used to manipulate plant community composition. He is currently working with faculty and researchers from several Indiana universities, state government, the USDA Forest Service, and the Nature Conservancy on the Hardwood Ecosystem Experiment. This project aims to determine the ecological and social impacts of long-term forest management on public and private lands in Indiana and the Central Hardwoods Region.

Joe Duchamp conducted his dissertation research on responses of bat communities to loss and fragmentation of forests within the upper Wabash River basin of Indiana.  He used ultrasonic detection and telemetry methods to 1) examine shifts in community structure related to evolved species traits and landscape features, 2) predict bat species occurrence using spatially hierarchical Bayesian models, 3) assess roost tree selection across landscapes, and 4) demonstrate the role of roosting bats in creating nutrient hotspots in forested ecosystems.  Joe currently is an Instructor in the Department of Biology, Indiana University-Pennsylvania, where he is conducting research on woodrats and bats, among other things.”

Former doctoral student Thomas M. Gehring is now an Associate Professor of Wildlife Biology, Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, MI.

Research Interests: Landscape Ecology, Managing Wildlife-Human Conflicts, Predator-Prey Ecology, Human Dimensions, GIS Applications
This photo of Tom with Great Pyrenees pups highlights one of his new research directions -- livestock guard dogs.
Contact Info:

Phone:  (989) 774-2484
Email:  tom.gehring@cmich.edu
Web:http://www.cst.cmich.edu/users/gehri1tm

Former M.S. student Jacob Goheen is now an assisant professor, Department of Zoology, University of British Columbia. His research interests are the assembly, dynamics, and structure of communities; animal-plant interactions and macroecology.

Phone: 505-277-1297
Email: jgoheen@unm.edu

Former postdoctoral research associate, Weidong Gu is now an associate research scientist at the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. His current research activities include population ecology of mosquitoes, spatio-temporal patterns of vector-borne diseases, and design of experimental and sampling studies

Email: wgu@inhs.uiuc.edu
Web: http://www.inhs.uiuc.edu/staff/index.php?action=list&user_name=weidong

Former research scientist, Andrei P. Kirilenko, is now an Associate Professor with the Dept. of Earth Systems Science & Policy in the School of Aerospace Sciences at the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND.

Email: andrei.krilenko@und.edu
Web: http://kirilenko.org

A former M.S. student, Mary Beth Kolozsvary earned her Ph.D. from the University of Maine .  She currently is a Biodiversity Scientist with the New York State Biodiversity Research Institute, where her research interests include amphibian ecology, vernal pools, aquatic food web dynamics, conservation biology, and community interactions.  She also serves as adjunct curator of herpetology at the New York State museum. Phone: 518-474-6531
Email: MKOLOZSV@MAIL.NYSED.GOV
Web: http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/bri/index.html

Dr. Jeffrey Lusk

Dr. Jeffrey Lusk is a postdoctoral scientist who is working on factors influencing temporal variation and covariation in mast production by hardwood trees.  He also is undertaking a study to explore the use of landscape metrics as predictors of thresholds in vertebrate biodiversity in Indiana .   Jeff attended the University of Illinois at Chicago , where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Biological Sciences with Departmental Distinction.  His undergraduate research investigated the foraging behavior of squirrels at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois .  He obtained a Master of Science degree in Zoology from the Cooperative Wildlife Research Laboratory at Southern Illinois University, studying the effects of hunting on mourning dove use of public hunting fields under different hunting-hour regimes.  He earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Oklahoma State University .  His dissertation applied neural-network models to understand the effects of climate, weather, and land use on the abundance of northern bobwhites.

Former Ph.D. student Jeff Moore is now a Postdoctoral Scientist with Duke University Marine Laboratory, where he is working to assess impacts of incidental take in marine fisheries on populations of sea turtles, marine mammals, and seabirds.

Email: jemoore@duke.edu
Web: www.duke.edu/~jemoore

Former doctoral student Tom Nupp is currently an associate professor of wildlife biology at Arkansas Tech University .  Tom teaches courses in wildlife management and GIS, and he conducts research on forest wildlife.   Email:  tom.nupp@atu.edu

Former Ph.D. student Kristen Page is now an Associate Professor of Biology at Wheaton College.

Her primary research interest involves the transmission dynamics of disease in human-altered landscapes. Currently Kristen is investigating the effects of urbanization on the transmission of Baylisascaris procyonis. She also has interest in patterns of disease emergence in the global south, and she has advised student research projects on diseases such as HIV/AIDS and hookworm in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, India, and Honduras.

Email: kristen.page@wheaton.edu
Web: http://www.kristenpage.com

Former doctoral student, Robin Russell is currently a postdoctoral scientist with the U.S. Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Bozeman , Montana , where she is working on effects of fire management on cavity nesting birds.  More information on the “Birds and Burns” project is at http://www.rmrs.nau.edu/lab/4251/birdsnburns/ Email: rerussell@fs.fed.us