Rethinking the value of nature from education to health
Dr. Heather Tallis, Global Managing Director and Lead Scientist for Strategy Innovation for The Nature Conservancy
Projects
Spectral Overlap and Temporal Avoidance among Singing Birds
Awardee: Yi-Ju Wang. Yi-Ju is interested in testing if song birds can use either temporal avoidance or spectral avoidance strategy, or both, to transmit signals.
Stream amphibian connectivity and conservation across the Santa Monica Mountains
La Kretz Center Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Gary Bucciarelli works with the National Park Service to study threatened amphibian populations in southern California.
Temporal and Spatial Niche Partitioning in a Small Mammal Community
Awardee: Rachel Chock. Rachel is researching whether microhabitat use and peak activity times for pocket mice vary within a night and across seasons with competitor abundance.
The Role of Sexual Selection in Speciation in Pacific Island Songbirds
Ever since Darwin’s “The Origin of Species,” biologists have been studying the causes of diversification and speciation. Speciation may be driven by sexual or ecological selection or random drift, and…
Toward a conservation physiology of Californian flora: assessing drought vulnerability and its variation with plant size across species and ecosystems
Awardee: Camila Medeiros. Camila's research aims to quantify the vulnerability of woody plant species to drought in key ecosystem types of California and model species’ relative sensitivities to drought under future climate chance scenarios.
Tracking migration of Cassin’s Vireo: identifying wintering grounds and assessing the impact of brood parasitism on migratory movements
Awardee: Richard Hedley. Richard's research will use cutting-edge technology to track migratory movements, contributing to a rapidly growing understanding of songbird migration.
UCLA Air Quality Management Training Program
Restoring the Blue Sky: 40-Year Lessons from Los Angeles
Understanding carbon sequestration and climatic variability in alpine wet meadows of Yosemite National Park, California
Awardee: Scott Lydon. Scott is investigating how past climatic variability has altered carbon sequestration in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and Yosemite National Park, California.
Understanding the persistence of Leptospira interrogans in California’s coastal wildlife: uncovering cryptic contributors in a complex multi-host disease system
Awardee: Sarah Helman. Sarah is collaborating with local wildlife and government agencies to obtain biological samples to test for evidence of past Leptospirosis exposure and current infection in various coastal mammalian species.
Urban Biodiversity: Cultures, Stories, Taxonomies
Cities have recently begun to attract the attention of ecologists and biologists as ecosystems whose functioning is not as yet well understood. Urban ecosystems combine ecological processes with social practices…
Using Citizen Science to Assess Urban Carnivore Communities in Los Angeles
Awardee: Tiffany Armenta. Tiffany is employing citizen scientists of all ages to help collect data on mesocarnivores to evaluate population densities or species-specific activity patterns in urban areas.