Recent updates

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November 2012: Our paper on understanding the roles of physiology and biotic interactions on range boundaries is now online in Ecography!

October 2012: Jill returns from a 2-month field season in Manu, where she and the other project PI's helped to organize the stations and complete the assistant training. This field season was also devoted to another onslaught of point count surveys -- together, Jill and Scott conducted 550 point counts between late-August and mid-October, extending the sampling of species distributions and range limits along the Manu elevational gradient into the foothills of Villa Carmen and to the Pantiacolla lowland station. This year we also had a roaming mist-netting team that worked to expand our surveys into the unknown corners of the Andes (below, at our camp on the Trocha Union).

August 2012: A very successful NAOC-V was hosted here at the University of British Columbia, with beautiful northwest summer weather. A big thank you to the many organizers and volunteers! Jill spoke in a symposium organized by Jeffrey Joy and colleagues, which introduced a much anticipated phylogeny of all birds. The article presenting the phylogeny of all bird species, published in the journal Nature, was just released in late October (click here). 

In the midst of all of this excitement, our fall crew of assistants arrived to the Manu stations, ready for the long haul: nest searching, netting and point count surveys and metabolic measurements until mid-December! Here are some of their early predation events (below), caught on film:

        

June 2012: Our second field season begins in Manu, with a summer crew focused on metabolic measurements of birds across our stations.

May 2012: Congratulations to Beth MacDonald for successfully defending her Master's thesis this month!  "Songbird Incubation Dilemmas in the Alpine: Managing Parent-Offspring Trade-Offs in a Variable Thermal Environment"

March 2012: It's official -- Jill's appointment as Assistant Professor in Zoology at UBC begins!

February 2012: Lauren Buckley, an assistant professor at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, visited the Biodiversity Research Centre as a guest speaker to share some of her recent work on mechanistic models of species distributions.  Also, Ken Feeley and Albert Uy invited Jill to participate in the Fairchild Mini-Symposium on Tropical Biology at the Fairchild Botanical Garden in Miami, which hosted a broad series of talks from tropical biologists at Florida International University and University of Miami. 

November 2011: The Neotropical Ornithological Congress in Cusco was a success.  Our research group made terrific contributions through their talks and posters. Congratulations to Jenny Muñoz for receiving the Best Student Talk Award for the conference!

September 2011: Our team has set up shop in Manu National Park at our three stations along the elevational gradient: Pantiacolla (400m), San Pedro (1400m), and Wayqecha (2900m).  Our loyal assistants will be there working and collecting data until mid-December!

                   

July 2011: Off to Nevados National Park in the Cordillera Central of Colombia to explore potential study sites along elevational gradients.  We will be moving from over 4000 m a.s.l. at Lago Otun to Otun Quimbaya at 1400 m a.s.l. 

      

May 2011: Jill and her colleagues, Gustavo Londono, Mark Chappell and Scott Robinson, received the terrific news that our NSF proposal to continue work with bird elevational ranges in Southeastern Peru is recommended for funding!

May 2011: Heading off to Banff National Park in Alberta for the annual Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution (CSEE) conference. 

January 2011: Jill accepted an Assistant Professor position in the Department of Zoology and Biodiversity Research Centre at the University of British Columbia.  

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