Center for Tropical Research April 2009 Newsletter
Letter from the Director
Dear Friends of CTR,
During the current global economic crisis that is affecting the livelihoods of so many people, we need to continue to serve as guardians of our planet’s resources and to campaign for governmental policies that will protect biodiversity. Our future economic health – and our ability to rebuild the economies of the world – is deeply dependent on the health of our planet. Global warming, habitat degradation, extinctions, and human alterations of the environment are changing our world at an alarming rate. It is crucial that we continue to conduct environmental research and build conservation programs throughout this critical time. Researchers at CTR are helping to carry out this important work.
The April 2009 CTR News & Updatesfeature article by Zachary Cheviron describes his studies of adaptation to high elevation in Rufous-collared Sparrows in habitats in the Peruvian Andes that are threatened by climate change. We are also presenting two field reports from CTR graduate students doing work in Brazil and Colombia. Hilton Oyamaguchi reports on his studies of adaptive variation in two frog populations in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil. Raul Sedano discusses the mechanisms of population differentiation in Andean birds in Colombia, how past climatic fluctuations have affected bird populations, and the future impacts of climate change.
Since our last News & Updatesin October 2008, we have welcomed five new researchers to CTR. We also continue to train many undergraduate students in our laboratory. We are expanding our research, conservation, and education projects in Ecuador. In February and March, CTR researchers helped organize two important avian influenza workshops in Cameroon. Research also continues on avian influenza and West Nile virus.
We would like to thank everyone for their continuing support.
Best Wishes,
Thomas B. Smith, Ph.D.
Feature Article
High-altitude Adaptation in Rufous-collared Sparrows
by Zachary Cheviron, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Scholar, Center for Tropical Research, Institude of the Environment, UCLA
Field Reports
Exploring the Mechanisms of Diversification in the Amazon Rainforest
by Hilton Oyamaguchi, Graduate Student, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Center for Tropical Research, Institute of the Environment, UCLA
Studying Mechanisms of Population Differentiation in Andean Birds
by Raul Sedano, Graduate Student, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Center for Tropical Research, Institude of the Environment, UCLA
Updates
Ecuador Project Highlights
The William Turner Gallery in Bergamont Station in Santa Monica, California hosted a very successful fundraising event for the Ecuador Project on October 19, 2008 – special thanks to host committee members Carol Coote, Lynne Grande, and Bill Turner! Project Director Jordan Karubian traveled to the project site in Ecuador in November 2008 and met with local government and non-governmental leaders. Project Coordinator Renata Durães has completed preliminary mapping of the project area using satellite imagery. Local residents working on the project made presentations at their second Jornadas de Biologia meeting held in Loja, Ecuador. The education project, led by Monica Gonzalez, completed its fourth year in December, reaching over 1,000 local school children. A project on the conservation of migratory birds, funded by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, is now underway in northwest Ecuador. Jordan Karubian and Renata Durães returned to Ecuador on March 19, 2009 for a month of field research.
Jordan Karubian gave presentations about the Ecuador Project to the Pomona Valley chapter of the Audubon Society in January 2009, and to the Conejo Valley Audubon Society and the Biology Department of Claremont McKenna College in Pomona, California in February 2009. Renata Durães gave talks to the Biology Department at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California and at the Environmental Science Colloquium seminar series hosted by the Institute of the Environment at UCLA in March 2009. They both presented a poster on their work about seed dispersal by Long-wattled Umbrellabirds at a symposium on “Living in a defaunated world: consequences for plant-animal interactions,” held at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California in March 2009.
CTR Researchers Organize Avian Influenza Workshops in Cameroon
Kevin Njabo and Thomas Dietsch coordinated a Government Inter-ministerial and Needs Assessment Workshop on “Avian Influenza Surveillance and Capacity Building in Central Africa” on February 5, 2009, in Yaounde, Cameroon. The workshop was organized by CTR in collaboration with the Ministry of Livestock, Fisheries and Animal Industries, the Ministry of Public Health, the Ministry of Scientific Research and Innovation, and the United Nations Development Program. The workshop was designed to bring together all of the relevant government ministries and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working on avian influenza to present their programs and research results. Delegates also discussed future research needs, including human, domestic bird, and wild bird surveillance. The delegates agreed that the workshop provided a rare opportunity to share results to better protect public health and the domestic bird industry. Future research-sharing workshops were recommended.
Kevin Njabo also facilitated a Wild Bird Sampling Workshop and Training for field technicians on “Avian Influenza Surveillance and Capacity Building in Central Africa” from March 6-7, 2009, in Akonolinga and Ndibi, Cameroon. The training focused on wild bird identification and sampling and the role of wild birds in the spread of avian influenza subtype H5N1. The workshop was geared toward enabling local health and wildlife personnel to conduct surveillance and to respond to sudden die-offs of wild birds. The workshop updated participants about recent outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), the role of wild birds in the potential spread of HPAI, and provided instruction on wild bird identification and sampling techniques. The second day of the workshop was a hands-on experience, and included an introduction to bird capture, biosafety and biosecurity protocols, and sampling of live birds. These workshops were funded by a grant to CTR from the National Science Foundation/National Institutes of Health/Fogarty International Center.
CTR Graduate Student Receives Ph.D.
Benjamin Wang received his Ph.D. from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in Fall 2008 for his thesis entitled “Impacts of Hunting on Seed Dispersal in a Central African Tropical Forest.”
CTR Welcomes New Researchers
Anthony Chasar was appointed a Staff Research Associate at CTR in March 2009 and left for a 42-day field trip in Cameroon to perform sampling on wild and domestic birds for CTR’s grant entitled “Avian Influenza Surveillance and Capacity Building in Central Africa.” This is a sub-award from UCLA School of Public Health Professor Scott Layne’s National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIH/NIAID) grant. It is part of the NIAID Centers for Excellence for Influenza Research and Surveillance (CEIRS) program, and is a collaborative effort with Scott Layne’s Center for Rapid Influenza Surveillance and Research (CRISAR).
Zachary Cheviron, who received his Ph.D. from Louisiana State University, was appointed as a Postdoctoral Scholar at CTR in January 2009. He is participating in research on the molecular genetic basis of bill size polymorphisms in Black-bellied Seedcrackers (Pyrenestes ostrinus).
Ali Hamilton recently received her Ph.D. from Louisiana State University and joined the CTR research team at UCLA. Her research is focused on determining the factors that generate and maintain diversity in reptile species endemic to oceanic island systems in the southwestern Pacific Ocean.
Eduardo Mendoza Ramirez has been appointed as a Visiting Scholar at CTR. He was awarded a two-year postdoctoral scholarship from the National Council of Science and Technology of Mexico (CONACYT). He will spend one year in the U.S. and one year in Mexico conducting research on topics related to the conservation of biodiversity in tropical forests in Southeast Mexico.
Edward Mitchard, a graduate student in the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), has returned to CTR to continue his collaborations with CTR researchers for his dissertation on using remote sensing as a tool to detect and quantify vegetation properties in tropical forest-savanna transitions.
Field Research Trips
Zachary Cheviron traveled to the Peruvian Andes in February 2009 to study adaptations to high elevation in Rufous-collared Sparrows. He was accompanied on the trip by his colleague Richard Gibbons, a graduate student from Louisiana State University, who was surveying bird communities in high altitude peat bogs, habitats that are poorly known and extremely threatened by climate change. They were assisted by two students, Shelia Antoinette and Flor Hernandez, from the Centro de Ornitologia y Biodiversidad in Lima.
Thomas Dietsch completed initial fieldwork in Cameroon near the Dja Reserve in February 2009 for a project to track the long-distance movements and habitat use of hornbills. For this project, he is attaching GPS satellite transmitters to two species of hornbills, White-thighed Hornbills and Black-casqued Hornbills.
Ana Paula Giorgi was in Brazil in 2008, between June and December, working on her Ph.D. dissertation on reserve designs in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. She spent a month in the field gathering data on her 24 target bird species and four months at Dr. Luis Fabio Silveira’s Ornithology Laboratory at the Universidade de Sao Paulo (USP) collecting additional data for her project. She also collaborated with the Ornithology Laboratory on a project studying distribution of a parakeet species in the Amazon rainforest.
Alex Kirschel traveled to Uganda in February 2009 for three weeks of research on his study species, Little Greenbul (Andropadus virens), Pogoniulus tinkerbirds, and Green Hylia (Hylia prasina), collecting samples and recordings.
Kevin Njabo spent one month in the field in Ndibi, Cameroon, in Winter 2009 collecting more than 2,000 samples of cloacal and tracheal swabs and feathers for CTR’s avian influenza research grants (National Science Foundation/National Institutes of Health/Fogarty International Center). He also collected blood slides of wild birds for CTR’s grant on the “Effects of Deforestation on the Prevalence of Blood-borne Pathogens in African Rainforest Birds” (National Science Foundation).
Hilton Oyamaguchi returned in January 2009 from a three-month field season in Brazil. He visited three museums to collect morphometric data on frogs and to get geographic coordinates for frog sampling sites. He surveyed frogs along the gradient between the Amazon rainforest and the Brazilian savannah (the Cerrado). He collected 500 samples with the assistance of four field assistants from the Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso and the Universidade Estadual do Mato Grosso. This research trip was supported by a Doctoral Student Research Grant from the UCLA Latin American Institute and the Faucett Family Foundation.
Raul Sedano returned in January 2009 from a six-month field season in Colombia where he obtained more than 800 samples from 10% of the bird species in Colombia for his dissertation project on mechanisms of local population differentiation in Andean birds.
Awards, Presentations, and Appointments
Allison Alvarado, Jaime Chaves, Adam Freedman, Hilton Oyamaguchi, and Raul Sedano received Research Awards from the Graduate Awards Subcommittee in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in March 2009.
Allison Alvarado, Paul Bunje, Henri Thomassen, and Tom Smith traveled to the Point Reyes Bird Observatory (PRBO) in Petaluma, California in January 2009 for meetings to discuss possible future collaborations on modeling the impact of climate change on Californian bird populations.
Emily Curd, Ryan Harrigan, Tom Smith, Henri Thomassen, and Erin Toffelmier attended the National Institutes of Health/National Science Foundation annual Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases Network Meeting in Park City Utah from March 30 to April 2, 2009. Ryan Harrigan gave a talk on CTR’s West Nile virus research and Emily Curd, Henri Thomassen, and Erin Toffelmier presented posters on CTR’s avian influenza research projects.
Ana Paula Giorgi was awarded a CAPES (Coordenacao de Aperfeicoamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior) fellowship for the academic year of 2009-2010. CAPES is a Research Center of the Brazilian Ministry of Education.
Ryan Harrigan presented a lecture in January 2009 entitled “Determining Predictors of West Nile Virus in a Local Hotspot” as part of the Environmental Science Colloquium seminar series hosted by the Institute of the Environment at UCLA.
Alex Kirschel received postdoctoral funding for Winter 2009 from the Veneklasen Foundation (Daniel Blumstein, Principal Investigator). He also received a collections study grant from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City to work with their ornithology collection.
Grants
California Department of Fish and Game, U.S. Department of the Interior
Population Structure of the Tricolored Blackbird in California: Are Northern and Southern Populations Genetically Distinct? (2009-2010)Max Planck Institute for Ornithology
Hornbill Conservation in Cameroon Cocoa. (2008-2009)Donors
We would like to thank the organizers and all of the donors who attended the fundraiser for the Ecuador Project held on October 19, 2008 at the William Turner Gallery in Bergamont Station in Santa Monica, California. We would also like to thank Noah’s Naturals in Los Angeles for their contribution to CTR as part of their membership in 1% For the Planet, an alliance of businesses that donate at least 1% of their annual revenues to environmental organizations worldwide.