Center for Tropical Research May 2010 Newsletter

Letter from the Director

Dear Friends,

The associated researchers of CTR continue to explore exciting research projects around the globe on a range of biodiversity, disease, and conservation issues.

We are making significant progress with our efforts to establish an International Research and Training Center (IRTC) in Cameroon. We are especially grateful to two new Friends of CTR, James Keston and Lee Cooper, who are helping us develop a business plan for the center. We recently established a small facility in Yaoundé, Cameroon, and are in the process of formalizing arrangements to run the center with UCLA. We are also pleased to have received formal support from the Cameroon Ministries of Higher Education and Forestry and Wildlife.

This year, we initiated new research projects in Cameroon and Egypt, in collaboration with the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health, to examine the dynamics of avian influenza transmission between birds and humans. Our project is part of a larger collaborative program with researchers in Asia and South America.

Our feature newsletter article by Lawren Sack and his collaborators describes the exciting work of the Hawai‘i Permanent Plot Network to preserve and restore Hawaiian forests. The field report from Pamela Thompson describes the important ecological role that bats play in the tropical forests of Mexico.

Thank you for your support and hope you enjoy the newsletter!

Best Wishes,
Thomas B. Smith, Ph.D.

Feature Article

Forest Dynamics Plots Established in Hawai‘i to Track Tree Regeneration Patterns and Climate Change Responses
by Lawren Sack, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Center for Tropical Research, Institute of the Environment, UCLA, and collaborators

Field Report

Bat Pollinators and Pollen Movement in a Tropical Dry Forest Tree
by Pamela Thompson, Graduate Student, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Center for Tropical Research, Institute of the Environment, UCLA

Updates

CTR Welcomes New Researcher

Kristen Ruegg, who recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University, will be helping CTR researchers launch a new project to determine patterns of migratory connectivity and develop models that predict how ranges of migratory songbirds may shift as a result of climate change. She will focus on grant writing and developing genetic tools to link populations of several targeted migratory songbird species throughout their annual cycle.

CTR Affiliates Leave UCLA for New Positions

Alex Kirschel completed his postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA and accepted a faculty position at the University of Cyprus in the field of Biodiversity and Ecology in the Department of Biological Sciences.

Jaime Chaves is expected to complete his Ph.D. in the UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in June 2010. He has accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in the laboratory of Professor John Klicka.

Eduardo Mendoza Ramirez completed a year of postdoctoral research at CTR and returned to Mexico in March 2010 to spend his second postdoctoral year at the Centro de Investigaciones en Ecosistemas, National Autonomous University of Mexico (CIECO-UNAM), Campus Morelia, in Michoacán, México. He will continue work on a collaborative grant between CTR and Professor Miguel Martinez-Ramos (CIECO-UNAM), funded by the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States and El Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (UC MEXUS-CONACYT), entitled “An Integrative Approach to Assess the Impacts of Land-Use and Climate Change on Mexican Tropical Biodiversity.” He will also continue field research on the ecology and conservation of the Central American tapir.

CTR Remembers Longtime Supporter Betty Franklin (1917-2010)

Betty Franklin, longtime CTR friend and supporter, died on January 4, 2010. Tom Smith, CTR Director, attended her memorial in Fairfax, California. In December 2002, Betty established a generous endowment for CTR through a Life Estate Gift Annuity. This gift arrangement enabled her to give a gift of her home to the UCLA Foundation while continuing to live in it and receive lifetime annuity payments. This gift will create the E.P. and Betty Franklin Endowed Fund in Tropical Conservation to support ongoing CTR research projects.

Field Research Trips

Jaime Chaves traveled to Santa Cruz Island, one of the Galapagos Islands, for one month in February of 2010 to conduct research on genetic variation in Darwin’s Finches. The trip was part of a research collaboration with Professor Jeffrey Podos, from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Professor Andrew Hendry, from McGill University in Canada.

Tony Chasar and Kevin Njabo are leading two new CTR projects in Cameroon and Egypt to examine the spillover and transmission of avian influenza virus among wild birds, domesticated birds and animals, and humans, especially humans in agricultural occupations (principally poultry- and swine-associated). This ongoing study is part of a global collaborative effort headed by the National Institutes of Health’s Fogarty International Center to examine the dynamics of flu transmission. Kevin and Tony led a team of researchers in Cameroon in December 2009 and January 2010 that collected samples of wild birds, domestic poultry, and swine. Tony led a team that continued sampling through March. The field assistants on the teams included Dennis Anye Ndeh, Francis Alemanji Forzi, and Djomo Nana Eric.

Kevin Njabo and Tom Smith traveled to Cairo, Egypt, February 1-7, 2010 to locate potential avian influenza study sites and meet with local collaborators. Kevin and Tony Chasar arrived in Egypt in April 2010 to begin field sampling for wild birds (resident and migratory) and domestic poultry. Most of the sampling is taking place in Upper Egypt (Al Fayyum) and two governorates (Sharkia and Garbia) of the Nile Delta, targeting previous H5N1 avian influenza outbreak areas where possible. The data collected will help to produce a model that contrasts transmission dynamics variables among target countries and enables researchers to predict transmission risks.

Alex Kirschel traveled to Gamboa, Panama, in March 2010 to continue his research on song variation in Neotropical passerines. Work was conducted primarily along Pipeline Road, a trail in Soberania National Park that holds the world record as the place where the highest number of bird species (385) were identified in a 24-hour period. The study was carried out in collaboration with Corey Tarwater, a Ph.D. student from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While in Panama, Alex also attended the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s annual symposium.

Hilton Oyamaguchi spent three and a half months in Brazil, from November 2009 to February 2010, collecting morphology and vocalization data from the Lesser Treefrog Dendropsophus minutus along the gradient between the Amazon rainforest and the Brazilian savannah (the Cerrado). His field team was comprised of two student assistants from the Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso and one biologist from the Universidade Estadual do Mato Grosso. At the conclusion of his field studies, he donated his frog samples to two museum collections: Dr. Célio F. B. Haddad’s frog collection at the Universidade Estadual Paulista and the vertebrate collection at the Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso. Hilton brought tissue aliquots of the frog samples back to UCLA for population genetics characterization.

Raul Sedano carried out field research in Colombia from August through December 2009 where he is studying mechanisms of local population differentiation in Andean birds. Fieldwork was conducted on the western versant of the Andean ranges flanking the Colombian Pacific coast with the goal of obtaining new data on sister species that exhibit displacement along the elevational gradient. The data from this fieldwork is contributing towards the national initiative to annotate four threatened bird species in the Northern Andes. During his field season, Raul collaborated with researchers at the Universidad de Nariño, as well as students from several graduate programs, to collect data on morphological traits and avian vocalizations.

Stephanie Steele traveled to the Bilsa Biological Research Station in Ecuador for six weeks in February and March 2010, along with fellow graduate student and CTR affiliate, Keith Gaddis, to conduct research for her dissertation. With the help of volunteers and staff from the Jatun Sacha Foundation, they established a series of seedling plots throughout the field site to track the effects of fungal pathogens on Rubiaceae seedling recruitment dynamics. Seedling samples were also collected for genetic work with the goal of identifying the genetic structure of potentially adaptive pathogen resistance genes across the landscape.

Awards, Presentations, and Appointments

Trevon Fuller and Ryan Harrigan gave presentations at the 2010 Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases Principal Investigators’ meeting held in Atlantic City, New Jersey from March 22-25. Both received Burroughs Welcome Travel Scholarships to attend the meeting, which was sponsored by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the Fogarty International Center, and the National Science Foundation. Trevon spoke on “Mapping the risk of avian influenza in wild birds in the U.S.” and Ryan presented a research project entitled “Predicting West Nile virus incidence under present and future climate conditions.” A poster, entitled “Using remote sensing to map the risk of human monkeypox virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” was presented on a collaborative project between researchers in CTR, the UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, the Department of Epidemiology, UCLA School of Public Health, and the NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Poster authors included Seth Blumberg, Wolfgang Buermann, Prime Mulembakani, James Lloyd-Smith, Anne Rimoin, Sassan Saatchi, Tom Smith, and Henri Thomassen.

Kristine Kaiser received a National Science Foundation Broadening Participation in Biology Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in April 2010 to study the effect of anthropogenic noise on amphibian physiology. She will begin a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Professor Wendy Saltzman at UC Riverside in September 2010.

Alex Kirschel gave a presentation at the 2010 American Ornithologists’ Union meeting in San Diego, California in February 2010. Alex’s presentation was entitled “Territory dynamics of Mexican antthrush (Formicarius moniliger) revealed by their songs.”

Kevin Njabo received an award from the International Ornithological Congress (IOC) Travel Support Committee to attend the 25th IOC in Brazil from August 22-28, 2010. He will be presenting a paper on “The isolation of avian Plasmodium from field-collected mosquitoes (Diptera: Culicidae) in the lowland forests of Cameroon.”

Hilton Oyamaguchi received a Sigma Xi grant to support his next field season in Brazil in Fall 2010. He also received recording equipment from Idea Wild, a non-governmental organization dedicated to conserving biodiversity, to support his studies of frog call differentiation along the gradient between the Amazon rainforest and Brazilian savanna.

Stephanie Steele received a Sigma Xi Grant-in-Aid-of-Research to support her laboratory work during 2010. Her work will focus on identifying neutral genetic markers and pathogen resistance genes from plant samples collected during her field season in Ecuador.

Pam Thompson received a Fulbright award for continued field research on bats and bat-pollinated trees in Jalisco, Mexico. The award is for a period of nine months, beginning in January 2011.

Grants

National Science Foundation

Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU). Supplement to: Effects of Deforestation on the Prevalence of Blood-borne Pathogens in African Rainforest Birds (2010)

New Friends of CTR

Jeff Buchbinder, Lee Cooper, and James Keston recently joined the Friends of CTR, which consists of supporters and donors who have come together to promote CTR’s research and conservation initiatives by helping to increase CTR’s visibility, public outreach, and fundraising efforts with public agencies, non-governmental organizations, foundations, and private donors.

Donors

The Center for Tropical Research (CTR) is pleased to announce a generous gift of $60,000 from Margery Nicolson that will support new research aimed at linking the migratory routes of birds. The research will use the latest genetic and isotopic approaches to identify where North American breeding birds winter in Latin America. Linking breeding and wintering areas of migratory birds is an essential first step in CTR’s efforts to understand the transmission and spread of infectious diseases, such as avian influenza and West Nile virus, as well as why some migratory bird populations are declining.