Forest Park Living Lab is understanding racoon ecology in urban land through GPS tracking and how this work informs One Health programs.
Bridging movement ecology and public health through One Health (Links to an external site)
Category: Post-doc
Lemur’s lament (Links to an external site)
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.
Fred: a goose on a mission (Links to an external site)
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.
St. Louis groups hope to inspire students to become scientists through ‘living lab’ (Links to an external site)
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.
Environmental DNA could revolutionize monitoring of fish and wildlife (Links to an external site)
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.
Into the forest (Links to an external site)
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.
Missouri native is flowering earlier due to climate change (Links to an external site)
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.
Climate and Wildflowers: Leavenworthia Study Sheds Light on Roles of Climate Change and Conservation (Links to an external site)
LEC post-doc Matt Austin leads research team to examine the role of climate change to discover warmer and drier springs is a major contributor to Leavenworthia blooming earlier.
Kaylee Arnold joins Tyson team as LEC postdoc (Links to an external site)
From exploring the beach and San Diego Zoo as a kid to studying kissing bugs in Panama as a PhD candidate, Kaylee Arnold’s path in biology has been a long and winding one. Most recently, it has brought her to St. Louis, where she is joining Washington University’s Living Earth Collaborative as a postdoctoral research associate.
Small flowers focus of big climate research at Missouri Botanical Garden (Links to an external site)
The Missouri Botanical Garden is known for its beautiful plants and flowers, but that’s not where you’ll find ecologist Matthew Austin.
Most days, you’ll find the post-doctoral fellow with Washington University’s Living Earth Collaborative combing the stacks, not of a library, but of the garden’s Herbarium, one of the world’s best research resources for all things plants.
How GPS tracking is helping expand our understanding of Forest Park (Links to an external site)
Learn about the Forest Park Living Lab project that started with LEC Seed grant monies. Experts in wildlife ecology, animal movement and veterinary medicine joined forces in a landmark collaboration to enhance how we understand Forest Park.
Forest Park Living Lab (Links to an external site)
St. Louis scientists including LEC postdoctoral fellow, Stella Uiterwaal, collaborate on new study of wildlife in one of America’s greatest urban parks called the Forest Park Living Lab. The Forest Park Living Lab received a LEC seed grant in 2022.
Squirrels and the city (Links to an external site)
Elizabeth Carlen is a postdoctoral fellow with the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis. She is studying how city life is changing the local populations of eastern gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis).
The birds and the bees — and the temperature gauge (Links to an external site)
Writing in the journal Ecology Letters, Michael Moore, a postdoctoral fellow with the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis, and his collaborators Noah Leith and Kasey Fowler-Finn at Saint Louis University (SLU) published a new paper in Ecology Letters.
Study: Climate change improves violet blooms, but there’s a hitch (Links to an external site)
Climate change is affecting how and when common blue violets reproduce, according to a study of preserved specimens of the flower published last month by the Missouri Botanical Garden and LEC postodotoral fellow, Matthew Austin.
Climate change is affecting when, how violets reproduce (Links to an external site)
Research from Matthew Austin, a postdoctoral fellow with the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis, found that climate change is affecting how the common blue violet, a common native flower, reproduce.
Wash U Biologist Explains How Lizards Evolved For Specialized Life In Trees (Links to an external site)
Aryeh Miller, a graduate student in the Evolution, Ecology, and Population Biology program at Washington University is also the lead author on a study, recently published in Oxford’s science journal, Systematic Biology, about how lizard species with sticky toe pads have an evolutionary advantage over their padless counterparts. LEC post-doc James Stroud co-authored the paper with Miller.
A brief history of the cabbage butterfly’s evolving tastes (Links to an external site)
Postdoctoral researcher, Mariana Braga, has modeled how butterfly-plant interactions evolve.
From pigeon stalker to squirrel chaser: Elizabeth Carlen studies urban wildlife in St. Louis (Links to an external site)
Meet Elizabeth Carlen, a Living Earth Collaborative postdoc and NSF postdoctoral fellow working in the Losos lab at Washington University
Brood X cicadas emerge in a rapidly changing world (Links to an external site)
Talk about a rude awakening. Brood X cicadas are coming of age in world that is drastically altered from the one their ancestors knew. LEC Postdoctoral Fellow, Brett Seymoure is a behavioral ecologist who studies the effect of lighting on animal behavior.
Mountain high (Links to an external site)
Andean forests have high potential to store carbon under climate change. The study — which draws upon two decades of data from 119 forest-monitoring plots in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Argentina — was produced by an international team of scientists including researchers supported by the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis. The lead author was Alvaro Duque from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia Sede Medellín.
Yes, spring flowers are blooming earlier. It might confuse bees. (Links to an external site)
“Climate change is altering when plants are blooming, and it’s disrupting the historic relationships between plants and their pollinators,” said Matthew Austin, an ecologist and biodiversity postdoctoral fellow with the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis. “But we know remarkably little about what effect that has on how plants interact with one another and the evolutionary consequences of altered plant-plant interactions.”
From strawberry poison dart frogs to Trinidadian guppies (Links to an external site)
Postdoctoral fellow Yusan Yang shares her path to Washington University and her belief that biology is not simply a formula or rule set to be followed.
What cold lizards in Miami can tell us about climate change resilience (Links to an external site)
Biologist James Stroud, a postdoctoral research associate in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, discovered that the lizard community responded in an unexpected way: all of them could tolerate cold temperatures down to about 42 degrees Fahrenheit, regardless of their species’ previous ability to withstand cold.
PBS NewsHour program on wildlife trafficking includes LEC Fellow, Odean Serrano (Links to an external site)
The Congo Basin is home to the world’s second-largest rainforest and a unique array of biodiversity. But the ecosystem’s remote location cannot protect it from the threat of poaching. Special correspondent Monica Villamizar and videographer Phil Caller traveled to the Central African Republic before the pandemic to report on indigenous tribal hunters working to protect endangered wildlife.