LEC Biodiversity News

LEC director Jonathan Losos has been elected a member of the American Philosophical Society

As part of the UN’s International Day of Biodiversity, Kara Andres, a postdoctoral fellow with the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis, collected samples of water from Simpson Lake, in Valley Park, Mo., as part of a coordinated global effort to use environmental DNA—genetic material shed by organisms into the environment—to document the current state of biodiversity.

LEC postdoctoral fellow, Kaylee Arnold, awarded 2024 Maya Angelou Award for Postdoctoral Excellence in Leadership for outstanding service and outreach in the Saint Louis community.

Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis and University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis (UHSP) contributed to a national study that identifies how gentrified parts of a city have notably more urban wildlife than ungentrified parts of the same city.

Recently observed interactions between lemurs and a losa are describe in a new paper published in Ecology and Evolution. The interaction highlights the importance of an ecological approach to biodiversity conservation.

What can be done when one threatened animal kills another? Scientists studying critically endangered lemurs in Madagascar confronted this difficult reality when they witnessed attacks on lemurs by another vulnerable species, a carnivore called a fosa.

Researchers from the Forest Park Living Lab Project including LEC post-doc Stella Uiterwaal are conducting bird surveys to understand where and when birds like the red-tailed hawks can be found in Forest Park

In a recently published paper in People and Nature, LEC post-doc Elizabeth Carlen and collaborators, demonstrated how citizen science data can be skewed by social and economic factors.

HEC Science and Technology video report features Biodiversity Fellow Nicole Miller-Struttmann’s Shutterbee Project, a community science project documenting St. Louis’ region’s bee diversity. The Shutterbee Project received a LEC seed grant in 2020.

In a new paper published in People and Nature, LEC post-doc Elizabeth Carlen and her co-authors shared a framework that illustrates how social and ecological factors combine to create bias in contributory data and offered some recommendations to help address the problems.

Meet Charlotte Taylor, a taxonomist at the Missouri Botanical Garden. She’s identified more than 500 new species, more than any other living woman in the field.

Meet Fred, the Canada goose, that has been fitted with a satellite tracking tag as part of the Forest Park Living Lab project which was funded by a LEC Seed grant.

The Living Earth Collaborative is supporting a critical project to restore primary forest in the heart of Betampona Reserve which comprises about 7.7 square miles of trees, surrounded by fields that have been cleared for agriculture.

Elizabeth Carlen and two of her undergraduate researchers work to bring science outside the walls of WashU.

Forest Park Living Lab partners with Gateway to the Great Outdoors (GGO) to bring St. Louis metro students from low income schools to get more students interested in science, nature, and ecology.

WashU researchers at Tyson Research Center use acoustic recorders to detect bats.

A citizen scientist participating in the Shutterbee Project,a research initiative supported by an LEC seed grant, discovered a rare parasitic bumblebee species, Bombus suckleyi, which was identified through the project’s efforts. This finding highlights the valuable contributions of citizen scientists to local biodiversity research and the importance of community involvement in ecological studies.

A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences led by Washington University Biology post-doc James Stroud and co-authored by LEC director, Jonathan Losos, is shedding new light on our understanding of evolution in species that live in close proximity to each other.

The Whitney R. Harris World Ecology Center at the University of Missouri–St. Louis used its annual Whitney and Anna Harris Conservation Forum last Tuesday night to explore the issue of urban heat islands, their impact and what can be done to mitigate them in an event titled, “It’s Getting Hot in Here: Urban Heat Effects and St. Louis.” LEC post-doc Kaylee Arnold was a featured panel member.

Postdoctoral research associate Kara Andres used eDNA to follow invisible trails of genetic information from fish. While her original work probed the Great Lakes, her recent work is focused on microbial communities in local waterways.

WHRO interviews LEC director, Jonathan Losos, about his new book, The Cat’s Meow.

With its host of top-rated attractions and miles of bike paths and running trails, Forest Park has enticed generations of WashU community members to step outside the university’s campuses and explore. Today, students and faculty are venturing deeper into the woods to learn about the biodiversity that teems there and to highlight the connectedness between the natural and the human.

In a world without humans, many dogs could survive due to their wolf ancestry and adaptability, but cats may face greater challenges from predation and competition. While cats are independent, their survival would depend on factors like outdoor access and the threat posed by larger predators, including dogs.

Matthew Austin, an ecologist and biodiversity postdoctoral fellow with the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis, published a study in the American Journal of Botany that describes changes to the flowering time and other important life cycle events in Leavenworthia species, a group of small flowering plants found in glades in Missouri.