CTR Updates - April 2009

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.

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CTR 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.

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CTR Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Scholar Awards and Presentations

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.

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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."

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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.

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Donors Support CTR

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.

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CTR Receives New Grant Support

• 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)

• UCLA International Institute Faculty Grants in International and Regional Studies. Multidisciplinary Research Initiative in a South American Conservation Priority: the Chocó Rainforest. (2009-2010)

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CTR Updates - October 2008

Ecuador Project Highlights

This has been an active time for CTR’s conservation and research work in Ecuador. CTR started the fourth year of its education program, which now reaches over 500 children, adults, and teachers in 15 local communities with information about reforestation, forest regeneration, and other environmental themes. Dr. Jordan Karubian, CTR Latin America Director and Project Coordinator, gave presentations at the 12th International Behavioral Ecology Congress (August 13 in Ithaca, New York) and at the Los Angeles Chapter of the Audubon Society (September 10 in Los Angeles, California) and Dr. Renata Durães gave a presentation on the project to the Environmental Volunteers group in Palo Alto, California (June 12). Dr. Karubian was also featured on a radio show on Indie 103.1 FM (June 23), and the project is being featured on the Earth Protect website in October 2008 (http://www.earthprotect.com).

Dr. Karubian recently received grants from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for the study of migratory birds and from the Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund for our community-oriented conservation work in Ecuador. Carol Coote and Sarah and Alex Graves hosted a successful fundraising event on behalf of the Ecuador Project on June 8, and we would like to thank all of the event committee members and everyone who made donations to the project.  We hope to see you at our next event, to be held on Sunday, October 19, from 4-6 pm, at the William Turner Gallery in Bergamont Station, in Santa Monica, California (click here for event flyer).

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Avian Influenza Project Update

Thanks to the monumental efforts of many volunteer bird banders from the Institute for Bird Populations and the Landbird Monitoring Network of the Americas, over 30,000 cloacal swabs and feather samples have been collected for the North America Avian Influenza Project.  In addition, more than 5,000 cloacal and tracheal samples from Africa, 1,500 cloacal tracheal samples from Vietnam, and 5,000 cloacal samples from South America have been collected by researchers affiliated with CTR. Out of the several thousand samples already processed, 2-11% tested positive for the presence of avian influenza. The subtypes have not yet been determined. Rates varied between locations and seasons.

Great progress has also been made in the collaborative study of the transmission of avian strains of influenza between birds and humans.  As part of this study, staff researchers from CTR and the UCLA School of Public Health sampled blood from nearly 200 people at the 2008 American Ornithologists’ Union meeting held in Portland, Oregon. These samples, from people with varied exposure to birds, will be tested for immune reactivity to antigens of different subtypes of influenza.

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CTR Field Research Trips

Wolfgang Buermann and Jaime Chaves traveled to the Galapagos Islands for six weeks in July and August to study phylogeographic associations between Yellow Warbler populations on different islands. They studied genetic, morphologic, plumage, and song variation.

Thomas Dietsch completed field research in the Red River Delta region of northern Vietnam in April 2008 where he worked on a project monitoring wild birds for avian influenza.  This research was made possible through support provided by the Office of Health, Infectious Disease and Nutrition, the Bureau for Global Health, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Wildlife Conservation Society. On September 29, he began fieldwork on a new project in Cameroon. He will be placing 20 GPS satellite transmitters on hornbills to track their  long-distance movements and habitat use. Previously, using standard radio telemetry, CTR researchers found that hornbills moved hundreds of kilometers outside of a protected forest reserve during fruit lean times. This work is a collaborative project between CTR, Dr. Martin Wikelski of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, and Dr. David Wilcox of Princeton University. The hornbill project is funded by the Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund and the National Geographic Society.

Hilton Oyamaguchi began a three-month field season in Brazil in September where he will be conducting research for his dissertation project, “Exploring the mechanisms of diversification in frogs in the Amazon rainforest.” He is examining the role of ecology resulting in divergence in vocalization and morphology traits in frog species in the transition area between the Amazon rainforest and the Brazilian Cerrado. He recently spent two weeks at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C. and the American Museum of Natural History in New York measuring specimens from different populations in this transition zone to help determine his target species.

Raul Sedano is spending six months in Latin America studying evolutionary processes and investigating the distribution of Neotropical birds in the Northern Andes of Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela. He will also collect bioclimatic and paleoecological data to model spatial shifts in habitat suitability that will provide a historical baseline to evaluate how climate change is affecting avian species in the Neotropics.

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CTR Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Scholar Awards and Presentations

CTR Director Tom Smith, along with six CTR graduate students and postdoctoral scholars, attended the AOU/COS/SCO 2008 Meeting sponsored by the American Ornithologists' Union, the Cooper Ornithological Society and the Society of Canadian Ornithologists/Société des Ornithologistes du Canada. At the meeting, held in Portland, Oregon from August 4-9, Allison Alvarado gave a talk on “Genetic and phenotypic variation across a migratory divide in the Hermit Thrush, Catharus guttatus.” Emily Curd gave a talk on the “Effects of avian migration and anthropogenic change on the distribution and transmission risks of avian influenza.” Ryan Harrigan gave a talk on “Ecological and anthropogenic factors influencing the distribution and transmission of West Nile virus in vector and host populations.” Alex Kirschel gave a talk on “Patterns of phenotypic evolution in two related African barbets.” Henri Thomassen gave a talk on “Facing climate change: a framework for including adaptive variation in conservation prioritization.” Tom Smith gave a talk on “Evolutionary consequences of human disturbance in a rainforest bird.”

Allison Alvarado received a Lida Scott Brown Conference Travel Award from the UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology to attend the American Ornithologists’ Union Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon, August 4-8, 2008. She also received a Lida Scott Brown Research Award for the 2008-09 academic year.

Wolfgang Buermann, Tom Smith, and Henri Thomassen attended the 2008 NASA Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems Joint Science Workshop in Adelphi, Maryland held April 28-May 2. Tom Smith gave a presentation at the Biodiversity and Ecological Forecasting Team Meeting on “Quantifying patterns of biodiversity in a changing climate.” Wolfgang Buermann presented a poster on “An analysis of the distribution and prevalence of malaria blood parasites in the Olive Sunbird across West African landscapes.” Henri Thomassen presented a poster on “Conserving adaptive variation: a new direction in conservation prioritization.”

Jaime Chaves received a Sigma Xi Grant-in-Aid of Research in May 2008 to investigate different genetic mechanisms and molecular pathways that determine how hummingbird bills are formed in this taxonomic group characterized by dramatic bill shapes. He received the Explorers Club Exploration Fund Award in June 2008 to complete laboratory work for his study on the role of the Andes in hummingbird speciation. He also received a Lida Scott Brown Fellowship for the 2008-09 academic year from the UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Thomas Dietsch gave a presentation on "Evaluating avian influenza reservoirs and transmission pathways between wild and domestic birds" at the Surveillance for Avian Influenza in Wild Birds training workshop for the Vietnam Department of Animal Health. The workshop, conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was held April 7-8, 2008 in Hanoi, Vietnam. 

Alex Kirschel received a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant in April 2008. In June 2008, he received the Otto H. Scherbaum Award and a Lida Scott Brown Fellowship from the UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Erin Marnocha received a Holmes O. Miller Fellowship for Summer 2008 from the UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. She also received a Conference Travel Award from the department to attend the Society for Conservation Biology 2008 Annual Meeting, held in Chattanooga, Tennessee July 13-17, where she gave a a talk entitled “Anthropogenic habitat alteration drives natural selection in an island lizard.”

Kevin Njabo attended the 12th Pan-African Ornithological Congress in Cape Town, South Africa from September 7-12, where he gave a talk on "A new vector for avian malaria in Cameroon." At the Congress, he was elected to the Pan-African Ornithological Congress Committee (PAOCC) and will serve from 2008 to 2016.

Hilton Oyamaguchi received a Doctoral Student Research Grant from the UCLA Latin American Institute in June 2008 for his proposed study on the diversification of frogs in the Amazon rainforest.

Raul Sedano received a Lida Scott Brown Fellowship for Summer 2008 and a Lida Scott Brown Research Grant from the UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Ben Wang received a Vavra grant for Summer 2008 from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

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CTR Graduate Students Receive Ph.D.s

Alex Kirschel received his Ph.D. from the UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in Summer 2008 for his thesis on “How ecology shapes bird song in tropical rainforests: the importance of song in generating biodiversity and structuring communities.” In Fall 2008, he accepted a position as a postdoctoral scholar in the UCLA laboratory of Professor Charles Taylor where he will continue his work in bioacoustics.

Erin Marnocha received her Ph.D. from the UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in Summer 2008 for her thesis entitled “Evolutionary change in human-altered habitats: morphological shifts, differential selection, and environmental drivers of phenotypic plasticity in the lizard Anolis sagrei.” She is now Project Manager for Once Upon a Watershed, a watershed education and restoration program based in Ojai, California.

Amy Rogers received her Ph.D. from the UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in Summer 2008. Her dissertation was entitled “Regeneration pattern and process in tropical secondary forest: how recruitment dynamics limit succession.” She will be continuing her conservation work in Ecuador’s northwest Esmeraldas Province as a full-time Research Fellow for the Pinchot Institute for Conservation. Her work is directed at implementing an integrated conservation management plan in the Mache-Chindul Ecological Reserve, one of three remaining expanses of Chocó coastal rainforest in Ecuador.

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CTR Welcomes Two New Researchers; CTR Researchers Receive New Appointments

Renata Durães recently received her Ph.D. from the University of Missouri-St Louis and joined the research team at CTR. She will be working with CTR Latin America Director Jordan Karubian on research, training, and educational projects in the Chocó rainforests of Ecuador and on fundraising efforts in the U.S.

Elena Berg, who was a postdoctoral scholar at CTR from 2004-2006, has returned for Fall 2008 to conduct research on the population genetic structure of the Southern California population of Tricolored Blackbirds, listed as a  “California Species of Special Concern.”  This project is funded by Audubon California, by the Sea & Sage, the Pomona Valley, and the Los Angeles chapters of the Audubon Society, and by the California Department of Fish and Game.

Thomas Dietsch, who has been a postdoctoral scholar at CTR since 2005, was appointed to the position of Assistant Researcher at the UCLA Institute of the Environment.

Jordan Karubian, who has been an Assistant Researcher at the Institute of the Environment since 2004, was appointed to the position of Associate Researcher.

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Donors Support CTR

We would like to thank everyone who has contributed to CTR and to the Ecuador Project this year. We would like to give special thanks to donors Margery Nicolson, John Karubian, the Rosenthal Family Foundation, Teens Beyond Boundaries, Marvin Jubas, and Ivan Samuels for their leadership gifts to the Ecuador Project.

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CTR Receives New Grant Support

• National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Centers for Excellence for Influenza Research and Surveillance (CEIRS). Avian Influenza Surveillance and Capacity Building in Central Africa. Center for Rapid Influenza Surveillance and Research (CRISAR) Research Grant (2008-2012).

• National Science Foundation/National Institutes of Health/Fogarty International Center. Avian Influenza Surveillance and Capacity Building in Central Africa (2008-2009). Supplement to: Effects of Deforestation on the Prevalence of Blood-Borne Pathogens in African Rainforest Birds.

• National Science Foundation. Research Experience for Undergraduates (2008). Supplement to: Effects of Deforestation on the Prevalence of Blood-Borne Pathogens in African Rainforest Birds.

• Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund. Umbrellabird Conservation in the Chocó (2008-2009).

• U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Migratory Bird Conservation Act Program. A Multidisciplinary Approach to Conserving Neotropical Migrants in the Ecuadorian Chocó (2008-2010).

• Environmental Protection Agency. The Role of Avian Host Dynamics and Anthropogenic Stressors on the Transmission of West Nile Virus and the Implications for Human Health and Biodiversity (2008-2011).

• Conservation, Food, and Health Foundation. Conservation Training and Education in the Ecuadorian Chocó  (2008).

• National Geographic Society. Long-distance Movements and Resource Use by Ceratogymna Hornbills in Central Africa (2008-2009).

• The Rufford Small Grants Foundation. Approaches to Correlating Vectors and Diseases in the Rainforests of Cameroon Using Molecular Genetics and Remote Sensing (2008).

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CTR Updates - April 2008

CTR Field Research Trips

Thomas Dietsch returned from two months of field research in the Red River Delta region of northern Vietnam in January 2008 where he is working on a project monitoring wild birds for avian influenza. He began a second research trip on February 20. This research was made possible through support provided by the Office of Health, Infectious Disease and Nutrition, the Bureau for Global Health, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Wildlife Conservation Society.

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CTR Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Scholar Awards and Presentations

Thomas Dietsch gave a presentation on February 16, 2008 at the Fourth International Partners in Flight Conference held in McAllen, Texas. About 700 people participated in the meeting. His presentation, “Assessing Conservation Values in Shade-grown Coffee Landscapes: A Model for Market-based Conservation Efforts and Ecosystem Management in a Global Context,” was part of the symposium session on the Value of Shade Coffee to Birds.

Ana Paula Giorgi was selected to give an oral presentation at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers to be held in Boston, Massachusetts from April 15-19, 2008.  Her presentation, "Using Species Distribution Modeling to Understand Tropical Birds Metapopulation Dynamics in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil," is part of the Species Distribution Modeling Roundtable Discussion session.

Alex Kirschel received a UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship for 2008 from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. On March 1, 2008, he gave a presentation at a meeting of the Southern California Animal Behavior Society, held at California State University Long Beach, on “Character Displacement in Tinkerbird Song."

Raul Sedano was chosen to attend a weeklong workshop at the Bodega Marine Laboratory from March 8-15, 2008. The workshop in applied phylogenetics, held each spring at the UC Davis laboratory in Bodega Bay on the Northern California coast, covered topics in biogeography, ecology, conservation biology, phylogenomics, functional morphology, macroevolution, speciation, and character evolution.

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Podcast Interview with Thomas Smith and Louis Bernatchez

Molecular Ecology published a Special Issue in January 2008 entitled “Evolutionary Change in Human-altered Environments.” The papers in the issue are a result of the international summit held at UCLA in February 2007 (see site here). A podcast interview with summit co-organizers and guest editors Thomas Smith and Louis Bernatchez is now available on the Molecular Ecology web site at http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/podcast/mec.asp.

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Donors Support CTR

CTR would like to thank the Los Angeles Audubon Society for their recent contribution to CTR’s research project studying the genetics of the Southern California population of Tricolored Blackbirds. Sea & Sage Audubon and Pomona Valley Audubon Society chapters have also contributed to this project. California Audubon has pledged to match the funds donated by the three Audubon chapters. In addition, we would like to thank the people at The Girls in the Vineyard for their donations. If you buy a case of wine from them, they will send a donation of $30 to CTR (please designate CTR as your non-profit organization of choice at the time of purchase).

CTR would like to thank Margery Nicolson for her continuing financial support for CTR’s research projects, most recently for conservation and education projects in the Chocó rainforest in Ecuador. We would like to thank everyone who has donated funds for this important work, including the Los Angeles Audubon Society, as well as those who responded to a mailing of a video describing CTR’s research projects in Ecuador, and those who attended and donated at the fundraising event in February organized by CTR Latin America Director Jordan Karubian.

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CTR Receives New Grant Support

• Orange County Vector Control District, Mosquito and Vector Control Association of California. Ecological and Anthropogenic Factors Influencing the Distribution and Transmission of West Nile Virus in Vector and Host Populations in Orange County, California
  

• National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates Supplement. EID: Effects of Deforestation on the Prevalence of Blood-borne Pathogens in African Rainforest Birds

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January 2008

CTR Field Research Trips

Emily Curd made two trips to Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) during the fall to collaborate with LANL in improving methods for the characterization of avian influenza strains and to test different viral storage buffers.

Jordan Karubian, CTR’s Latin America Director, spent three weeks in Ecuador in November 2007 consulting with the Ecuadorian field team responsible for coordinating CTR’s ongoing project in the Chocó rainforest. This project combines scientific research, conservation education, and training of local residents and university students. Dr. Karubian and a number of his Ecuadorian colleagues traveled to the XXXI Jornadas Nacionales de Biología, a scientific meeting held in Guayaquil, Ecuador, from November 22-23. Three local residents who work as field researchers on the Chocó project presented talks at the meeting. Jorge Olivo spoke on seed dispersal by Long-wattled Umbrellabirds, Domingo Cabrera spoke on timing and extent of fruit production, and Fernando Castillo gave a presentation on seed removal in relation to habitat quality. Talks were also given by Jordan Karubian and by the current project coordinator, Luis Carrasco, as well as by Maria Fernanda Armas, Rocio Monobanda, and Patricio Mena (current and former honors thesis students who worked on the project).

Tom Smith, Dan Blumstein, Allison Alvarado, and Brenda Larison spent three weeks at the Mpala Research Centre in Kenya in October 2007, along with 15 undergraduate students enrolled in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Field Biology Quarter (FBQ) course. Professors Tom Smith and Dan Blumstein taught the class and Allison Alvarado served as a teaching assistant.

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CTR Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Scholar Awards, Presentations, and Appointments

Wolfgang Buermann was recently appointed as an adjunct assistant professor at UCLA in the Institute of the Environment and the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. He presented a poster at the Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Disease Principal Investigators Meeting held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, from December 2-5, 2007. The meeting was sponsored by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. His poster was entitled “Testing spatial predictions of malaria blood parasites in the Olive Sunbird across Western Africa.”

Emily Curd presented a poster at the Evolution of Infectious Disease Principal Investigators Meeting in Albuquerque entitled, “Avian influenza virus (AIV) detection and subtyping using High Resolution Melting (HRM) QPRC.” Her second poster presentation was on “Rapid subtyping of avian influenza virus strains using fragment analysis.”

Ryan Harrigan presented a talk at the Evolution of Infectious Disease Principal Investigators Meeting in Albuquerque on “Determining the effects of bird migration and anthropogenic change on the distribution and transmission of avian influenza.”
 
Kevin Njabo received a Burroughs Welcome Travel Scholarship to attend the Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Disease Principal Investigators Meeting in Albuquerque. Kevin presented a talk at the meeting on “Effects of deforestation on avian disease prevalence in Africa.”

Adam Freedman received a Research Award for 2007-2008 from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

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CTR Receives New Grant Support

• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The role of avian host dynamics and anthropogenic stressors on the transmission of West Nile virus and the implications for human health and biodiversity (2008-2011)
  

• Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Climate Change, Biodiversity, and Ecosystem Function in the Eastern Andes (2007-2010)

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October 2007

CTR Field Research Trips

Tom Dietsch traveled to Vietnam in July for a pre-research planning trip for a new project that will monitor wild birds for avian inflenza in the Red River delta region.  The project, entitled “Evaluating disease transmission pathways and host reservoirs for H5N1 avian influenza in domestic and wild bird communities of Viet Nam,” will assess the subtypes and strains of avian influenza across a gradient of human land-use from home gardens to natural wetlands in coastal communities of northern Vietnam.  This research was made possible through support provided by the Office of Health, Infectious Disease and Nutrition, the Bureau for Global Health, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Tom Smith conducted a month of field research in Cameroon this summer collecting samples for avian blood parasite studies. In addition, he conducted research on Black-bellied Seedcrackers (Pyrenestes ostrinus, pictured above) a species of African finch that shows a polymorphism in bill size. Smith began working on seedcrackers in 1983 as part of his Ph.D. dissertation. On this trip he returned to the village of Ndibi, in south central Cameroon, where he has been working for over 20 years. The work is part of a new collaborative study with Dr. Arkhat Abzhanov, from Harvard University, and is aimed at identifying the genes determining bill size in this finch.

Kevin Njabo sampled mosquitoes in twelve localities in lowland forest areas in Cameroon from June 15 to September 15 using CO2-baited CDC light and gravid traps. Over 6,000 culicine mosquitoes from 13 genera were collected from these sites, including Coquillettidia mosquitoes, which had never before been reported in this area. These results highlight the diversity of vectors and the possibility of defining new potential vectors, regional differences in vector competence, and the need to conduct further studies to develop effective programs for mosquito control.

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CTR Welcomes New Postdoc and Graduate Students

Ryan Harrigan has joined CTR as a postdoctoral scholar working on the ecological correlates of infectious disease, including West Nile virus and avian influenza. This research will help to determine the role that vector ecology, climatic change, and host-vector dynamics play in the presence and prevalence of infectious diseases within particular environments, with a focus on the transmission of arboviruses within avian hosts (and secondary mammalian hosts, including humans) in North America. Ryan recently received his Ph.D. from Boston University, where his research focused on the phylogeography, population genetics, and hybridization of members of the Mallard complex (genus: Anas).

Hilton Oyamaguchi joined the research team at the Center for Tropical Research this Fall. He is a new graduate student from Brazil in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He completed his master’s thesis at the Universidade de São Paulo where he studied the spatial distribution of frogs in the Cerrado, the world’s most biologically rich savanna. His Ph.D. project will utilize frogs as a model to study diversification processes in the Amazonian rainforest.

Raul Sedano, from Colombia, recently joined the Center for Tropical Research. He received his master’s degree from San Diego State University, where he was studying the phylogeny and biogeography of mountain tanagers. His Ph.D. research project in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA will focus on Neotropical birds in northwestern South America.

John McCormack received his Ph.D. in Biology in September 2007 and is leaving UCLA to begin a postdoctoral research position at the University of Michigan in the lab of Dr. Lacey Knowles.  His Ph.D. thesis was entitled, “Evolutionary Patterns and Processes at Multiple Spatial and Temporal Scales in a New World Jay.” At the University of Michigan, he will continue studying evolutionary processes in the “sky islands” of Arizona, Colorado, and Mexico.

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CTR Director Tom Smith Appointed Acting Director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment

Tom Smith, Director of the Center for Tropical Research, has assumed additional responsibilities as the Acting Director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment. Mary Nichols, Director of the Institute of the Environment from 2004-2007, was named by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to head the California Air Resources Board. Tom Smith will continue to serve in both positions until a new permanent director for the Institute of the Environment is recruited.

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CTR Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Scholar Awards and Presentations

Tom Dietsch presented at two meetings in August 2007. He gave a talk on "Avian influenza and wild birds" to the New World Agriculture and Ecology International Meeting in Santa Cruz, California and gave two presentations at the Ecology Society of America annual meeting in San Jose, California. He spoke on "Evaluating birds and shade tree communities in cacao agricultural landscapes of Cameroon" at the Organized Oral Session on Ecoagriculture: Restoring wild biodiversity, livelihoods, and ecosytem processes in agricultural landscapes and was co-author for a talk on "Landscape constraints on functional diversity in tropical agroecosystems" at the Organized Oral Session on Tropical agroforestry as model systems for ecology.

Allison Alvarado received a conference travel grant from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology to attend the Cooper Ornithological Society Annual Meeting held in Moscow, Idaho in June 2007.

Jaime Chaves received a Lida Scott Brown Fellowship for Fall 2007 and a Lida Scott Brown Research Award for the 2007-2008 academic year. He also received a conference travel grant from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology to attend the VIII Neotropical Ornithological Congress in Maturín, Venezuela, May 13 to 19, 2007, where he gave an oral presentation.

Amy Rogers received a Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Dissertation Year Fellowship for 2006-2007.

Ben Wang received a Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Dissertation Completion Fellowship for Summer 2007.

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Donors Support CTR

CTR would like to thank Margery Nicolson for her generous on-going financial support for a number of CTR research projects. CTR would also like to thank Gary Morris and the GAIA Foundation for its support for CTR’s International Research and Training Center in Ecuador. In addition, we would like to thank the Sea & Sage Audubon and Pomona Valley Audubon Society chapters for their financial support for CTR’s research project studying the genetics of the Southern California population of Tricolored Blackbirds.

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CTR Receives New Grant Support

• Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund. Hornbill Conservation in Cameroon Cocoa.  (2007-2008)

• Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund. Umbrellabird Conservation in the Chocó. (2007-2008)

• Wildlife Conservation Society. Evaluating Disease Transmission Pathways and Host Reservoirs for H5N1 Avian Influenza in Domestic and Wild Bird Communities of Viet Nam. (2007-2008)

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June 2007

Spring/Summer CTR Field Research Trips

AFRICA (Cameroon and Ghana)

Tom Dietsch returned from a three and a half month research trip to Cameroon on May 1. The purpose of the research was to evaluate potential disease transmission pathways for H5N1 avian influenza in northern Cameroon. This research was made possible through support provided by the Office of Health, Infectious Disease and Nutrition, the Bureau for Global Health, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Wildlife Conservation Society. While in Cameroon, Tom also advised graduate research by Casey Sanders from Technische Universität München in Freising, Germany, on the foraging ecology of birds in Cameroon's cacao agroforests in collaboration with the Sustainable Tree Crops Program.

Kevin Njabo will travel to Cameroon for 12 weeks, beginning in June 2007, to conduct field research on the vectors for Plasmodium, the parasite responsible for human and avian malaria. As part of CTR’s National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, he will research which mosquito (vector) species are carriers of the parasites.

Henri Thomassen will travel to Cameroon for six weeks in June and July to study the impact of habitat fragmentation on breeding colony connectivity of the threatened Central African rockfowl (Picathartes oreas).

Ravinder Sehgal, Gediminas Valkiunas, and Tony Chasar will travel to Ghana for the month of July. Tom Smith, Tony Chasar, and Dennis Anye Ndeh will spend a month during August and September in Cameroon. They will be carrying out field research for CTR’s NSF grant on the effects of deforestation on blood-borne pathogens in African rainforest birds. They will be collecting blood samples from target species to groundtruth a remote sensing predictive model on the prevalence of disease

LATIN AMERICA (Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Venezuela)

Ana Paula Giorgi will spend two months of the summer, from July 9 to September 9, doing fieldwork in Brazil for her Ph.D. project on the “Application of Remote Sensing and Ecological Niche Modeling: Approach in Restoration and Conservation of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.”

Jordan Karubian, CTR’s Latin America Director, traveled to Ecuador from May 20 to June 17 to conduct field research and consult with CTR’s research team on ongoing conservation, education, and research projects (click here for more information on CTR projects in Ecuador)

Jaime Chaves traveled to Venezuela for a month and a half in May and June to conduct research on speckled hummingbirds in the Cordillera de la Costa montane forests located on the northern coast of Venezuela. He will also conduct sampling in the Andes of Venezuela.

Erin Marnocha joined Professors Greg Grether, Peter Narins and 14 undergraduate students in Nicaragua for the UCLA Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Field Biology Quarter (FBQ) from April 30 to May 19. Erin served as the teaching assistant for Professor Grether’s course on “Field Behavioral Ecology.”

NORTH AMERICA (Mexico)

John McCormack spent three weeks in April with a research team in the Sierra del Carmen region of Mexico studying patterns of divergence in egg color in Mexican Jays along an elevational gradient.

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CTR Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Scholar Awards and Presentations

Allison Alvarado received two Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department grants, the Lida Scott Brown Fellowship for Summer 2007, and the Lida Scott Brown Research grant.

Jaime Chaves attended the VIII Neotropical Ornithological Congress in Maturín, Venezuela, May 13 to 19 where he gave an oral presentation on “The role of ecology and geography in shaping the phylogeography of the speckled hummingbird in Ecuador.” He also presented a poster entitled "Standing at the shoulder of giants: the role of the Andean uplift in hummingbird diversification,” at the 10th Annual Biology Research Symposium sponsored by the UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in May 2007. Jaime was awarded a Doctoral Research Grant in May 2007 from the UCLA Latin American Center.

Ana Paula Giorgi received a Tinker Field Research Grant from the UCLA Latin American Center to carry out her Ph.D. research in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil during the summer of 2007.

Jordan Karubian attended the VIII Neotropical Ornithological Congress in Maturín, Venezuela, May 13 to 19, 2007, where he gave three oral presentations based on his research with colleagues: 1) Lek dynamics and sexual selection in the long-wattled umbrellabird (Cephalopterus penduliger, cotingidae), 2) Causes and consequences of non-random seed dispersal by the long-wattled umbrellabird (Cephalopterus penduliger), and 3) Natural history and conservation of the banded ground-cuckoo (Neomorphus radiolosus).

John McCormack was awarded the 2007 Lasiewski Award in recognition of his outstanding research in Organismic Biology in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He received a Lida Scott Brown Fellowship for Summer 2007. In May 2007, he also received an Explorer’s Club Research Grant and the American Ornithologists’ Union Van Tyne Research Award. John gave an oral presentation at the VIII Neotropical Ornithological Congress in Maturín, Venezuela, held May 13 to 19, on “Genetic differentiation in the Mexican jay (Aphelocoma ultramarina): diversification in the Mexican highlands.” He recently had a first-author paper on Mexican jays accepted for publication in Behaviour. John will be leaving CTR in the fall to accept a postdoctoral position with Dr. Lacey Knowles at the University of Michigan.

Kevin Njabo will attend the 2007 annual meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, from July 1 to 7. Kevin was awarded a $1,200 travel grant by the Society for Conservation Biology to present a paper on “The speciation and phylogeography of African hill babblers.” At the meeting, he will also give a presentation to the Young Women Conservation Biologists working group.

Shauna Price received a Tinker Field Research Grant from the UCLA Latin American Center to do research in Panama for a month in September to collect ant species for phylogeographic analysis.

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CTR Receives New Grant Support

April 2007

Report on UCLA Institute of the Environment International Summit
The international summit on “Evolutionary Change in Human-altered Environments,” held at UCLA from February 8-10, was attended by 325 people from 21 countries. Sponsored by the UCLA Institute of the Environment, and co-organized by CTR Director Thomas Smith and Professor Louis Bernatchez, the summit brought together more than 50 prominent scientists and policy makers to discuss solutions to the many environmental problems we face. In addition, 104 people presented posters at the summit. Many graduate students and postdoctoral researchers attended this groundbreaking educational event.

The speakers’ abstracts and presentations can be viewed on the summit web site at under the link for “Speaker Presentations.” The abstracts and most of the talks can be accessed by clicking on one of the links next to the speaker’s name. Later this year, Blackwell Publishing will be publishing the proceedings in a special issue of the journal, Molecular Ecology. The publication date will be announced on the summit web site.

New Researchers Join CTR Team
Henri Thomassen, a new CTR postdoctoral scholar, was previously at Leiden University in The Netherlands. Henri is studying the role of sexual selection in allopatric speciation in honeyeaters, as well as working on mapping morphological and genetic patterns as part of CTR’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) project on climate change and biodiversity.

Kevin Njabo, previously at Boston University, and originally from Cameroon, is also a new postdoctoral scholar at CTR. Kevin is working on the ecology and evolution of avian tropical diseases in Africa as part of CTR’s research team for a grant funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Emily Curd has joined the CTR team as a staff research associate. She is working on CTR’s avian influenza research project. She recently received her master’s degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Ryan Harrigan, previously at Boston University, is a new CTR research associate. He is working on a project investigating the ecological changes in bird populations and how these changes affect infectious disease transmission.

CTR Graduate Students Receive Awards
John McCormack received a grant from the Frank M. Chapman Memorial Fund of the American Museum of Natural History to study the speciational history of the New World jay genus Aphelocoma.

Erin Marnocha received an Ecology and Evolutionary Biology departmental conference travel award to present a talk entitled “Anthropogenic habitat alteration affects the strength and form of natural selection in the brown anole (Anolis sagrei)” at the Evolution 2007 meeting, the joint annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the Society of Systematic Biologists, and the American Society of Naturalists to be held in Christchurch, New Zealand, in June 2007. She also received a travel award for the meeting from The Society for the Study of Evolution.

Allison Alvarado received a Lida Scott Brown Research Award in Fall 2006 for her study of patterns of evolutionary differentiation in the hermit thrush (Catharus guttatus) in British Columbia.

Ben Wang was awarded the Alwyn Gentry Award for Best Graduate Student Presentation at the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation meeting held in Kunming, China, in July 2006 for his presentation on “Repercussions of extirpating mammals: reduced seed removal and dispersal of the Afrotropical tree, Antrocaryon klaineanum (Anacardiaceae).”

Jaime Chaves was awarded the Most Outstanding Graduate Poster Presentation at the Ninth Annual Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Research Symposium, held at UCLA in June 2006, for his poster entitled "The role of geography and ecology in shaping the phylogeography of the speckled hummingbird (Adelomyia melanogenys) in Ecuador."

Contribution for CTR Graduate Student Researcher
CTR would like to thank Margery Nicolson for providing a second year of support for CTR graduate student Jaime Chaves. Jaime is a biologist from Ecuador who is studying the evolution of speckled hummingbirds in South America.

CTR Receives New Grant Support

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October 2006

UCLA Institute of the Environment to Host International Symposium, February 8-10, 2007
CTR Director Thomas Smith and Professor Louis Bernatchez are the organizers for a symposium entitled Evolutionary Change in Human-altered Environments: An International Summit. Click here for more information.

CTR Awarded NIH/NIAID Avian Influenza Grant
The Center for Tropical Research was recently awarded $2.5 million by the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIH/NIAID) for a four-year project to study the “Effects of Avian Migration and Anthropogenic Change on the Distribution and Transmission Risks of Avian Influenza.” This research effort targets migratory landbirds in North, Central, and South America.

Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund Names Don Jorge Olivo a Conservation Hero
The Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund (DWCF) selected Don Jorge Olivo as one of eight Conservation Heroes for 2006 and awarded him $1,000. Olivo works as a full-time field biologist with the Center for Tropical Research team at the Mache Chindul Reserve in Ecuador.  According to Disney’s press release, Olivo was chosen “for his work as a field researcher, educator, and a community leader helping to protect valuable habitats and species, particularly the Long-wattled Umbrellabird.” Kim Sams, DWCF Manager, said that “the DWCF Conservation Heroes program rewards the dedication of individuals who, often at the risk of personal safety, work tirelessly to save animals, protect habitat and educate the people in surrounding communities.” Click here to read more on Olivo’s work in Ecuador.

Adam Freedman Receives EPA STAR Fellowship
CTR graduate student Adam Freedman received the prestigious Environmental Protection Agency Science to Achieve Results (EPA STAR) fellowship for three years to study mechanisms of diversification in rainforest lizards in West Africa. Adam has completed three field seasons in Cameroon, spending a total 13 months.

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July 2006

CTR Students Awarded Fellowships
CTR graduate students Allison Alvarado, Jaime Chaves, and John McCormack received Lida Scott Brown Fellowships, Adam Freedman received a Quality of Graduate Education Fellowship, and Amy Rogers received a Vavra Fellowship for $6,000 each. Chaves and Ben Wang also received conference travel awards, and Wang received the 2006 Special Faculty Award in recognition of his outstanding service to the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Both Rogers and Wang were also awarded UCLA Graduate Division Dissertation Year Fellowships for $17,500. The CTR Lab received the Most Outstanding Laboratory Poster Presentation at the Ninth Annual Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Research Symposium at UCLA.

CTR Receives New Grant Support in 2006

May 2003

CTR's first Open House!
On May 14th, the Center for Tropical Research held its first open house to welcome all Affiliated Faculty, Senior Research Fellows, and interested members of the UCLA community to meet CTR faculty, postdocs, students and staff. It was an opportunity to update everyone on CTR research projects and international research nodes, as well as to brainstorm new collaborative projects for the future. Judging by the crowd of 75-plus who stopped in, the decibel level of lively discussion, and the empty plates and glasses during the clean-up, a good time was had by all.

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February 2003

CTR Endowment Receives First Major Gift
On December 20, 2002, a generous gift was made to the Institute of the Environment for the Center for Tropical Research. The gift eventually will create the E.P. and Betty Franklin Endowed Fund in Tropical Conservation. UCLA planned giving staff worked closely with donor Betty Franklin, to establish a Life Estate Gift Annuity. This gift arrangement enables Betty to give a gift of her home of 56 years to The UCLA Foundation while continuing to live in and enjoy it. Betty will receive lifetime annuity payments, and after her lifetime, her gift will benefit the Center for Tropical Research.

CTR gratefully acknowledges the generosity of donor, Betty Franklin. In order to get to know our benefactor a bit more, we asked Betty to give us a little background on her life and interests, and tell us a about her late husband, E.P. Betty graciously responded with the following written account for our newsletter and website:

On April 19, 1917: I was born in Westwood, Lassen County. It's a small California town, near Lake Alamanor, Susanville, and not too far from Nevada and was owned by the Red River Lumber Company and featured one dentist-my dad. I grew up being fascinated with his medical books and planned on eventually doing scientific research. But a talent for acting took precedence and all through grade and high school, I was doing something on stage.

After graduating, my father, now divorced from my mom, insisted that I pursue a higher education. But a friend and I with whom I'd appeared in Bay Area little theater performances, were offered something irresistible. We were invited to join a New York repertory company, founded by leading actors from the famed Moscow Art Theater. A challenging audition was required, and both of us were accepted.

The Stanislavsky Method of acting (still prevalent in theater arts) was what our group featured. It was complex, disciplined-in itself a veritable philosophy for living. In fact, I considered it to be comparable to an academic education. So I was motivated to disappoint my dad and follow my bliss. We studied day and night, day in, day out, for four years-poor and hungry, but dedicated.

Finally our director considered us ready to find a backer for a Broadway presentation, which was accomplished. Then we rehearsed for another full year, before appearing at the Vanderbilt Theater. The play by August Strindberg was mystical and in no way acceptable to the denizens of Manhattan at that time. In other words, it was a huge flop, much publicized in local reviews and not "damned with faint praise", but damned with headlines.

Our group was devastated and destroyed. But with the help of a member of our former group, I was given very brief lines in major radio shows of the time, such as Gang Busters, and Mr. District Attorney. During that period, I got to know very talented actors, many of whom went on to TV and movies. In a while, I found work in the garment district, modeling flimsy coats in the icy New York winters and vice versa in summer months. I wasn't a very good model, but the four brother owners like me and decided I could best serve them by writing their correspondence for which I had more talent.

Eventually, after all the years of struggling, I was homesick and returned to Westwood for a family visit. But getting employment was still a factor, so the Bay Area was my next destination. There I met a radio station salesman, who urged me to consider becoming an off-the-beaten path personality, writing scripts about exploring special shops, to be broadcast on what was then KJBS, where he worked. I followed the suggestion, waited and waited and finally consulted a former Westwood friend, involved in the broadcast industry. He assured me that the KJ format-a very successful one-was exclusively news and music and then and there phoned the manager, Ed Franklin, saying I was on my way to talk with him.

I marched in, submitted my manuscripts, only to learn that what my friend had said was true, even though manager Franklin complimented my efforts. He asked if I could write advertising copy, to which I boldly replied, 'certainly.' It wasn't true, but I had to believe I could do it. And I did-at Ed's best friend's advertising agency. The job went well and I learned valuable new skills which bolstered faith in myself.

Ray Sines, my new boss often predicted that Elizabeth Edwards (my maiden name) and E.P. Franklin would marry. This amazed me because there had been no evidence of that. Finally, the handsome hunk, considered to be a great catch, invited me to dinner and a play, at which time we both made it clear that marriage for us was out of the question, because we wanted to pursue careers. As it turned out, that first date was on July 1st, 1941 and we said our vows on the following August 15th!

After the whirlwind courtship, I was to learn that I'd married a remarkable man, beautiful inside and out. And I was blessed with him, this lovely property which we found together, and 30 shared years until Eepie suddenly passed away on December 4, 1971. He was only 63. Tributes coming to me from many sources, emphasized how respected, admired and loved he was.

We had become passionately involved in environmental matters, triggered when a deer-kill was planned on the Tamalpais game refuge, where our home was and is situated. Because of Eepie's popularity within broadcast and print media, we had important access to them and became increasingly caught up in crusading for a safer environment, freer from toxic substances, especially those from industrial stacks. And we became recognized nationwide, as an effective team.

After my husband's death, I was invited to write for Prevention magazine, briefly, until the editor left for a competitive publication, Let's LIVE. He asked me to come along, which I did, originally specializing in rather staid scientific articles. But it was rewarding to have health professionals thank me for making a rhetorical bridge between scientific jargon and lay persons' understanding of it. When asked to do a more informal column, I was delighted, named it "Of Many Things," and it was published every month for all those years, becoming quite popular.

Writing for Let's LIVE magazine continued from 1974 until just several years ago. I miss the privilege of sharing information, but so many maintenance projects here where I've lived since Halloween in 1947, keep me busy from mid-morning until early next day. Being 85, I've slowed down a bit and everything takes longer. After a five year drought, I began feeding starving deer and raccoons and sometimes foxes-even skunks. Now they all hang out here and I'm totally obligated, so I don't travel, which is no problem. If "civilization" hadn't ruthlessly encroached upon their habitats, feeding them would be wrong, but I feel they're owed a little help. They've become my family-not pets, but great friends. And of course, the wonderful wild birds get special seed and nectar. I also cherish two little dogs-Holly and Ariel.

Now, I'm finding great fulfillment in knowing that this lovely land will serve a good cause, when I pass on. And it was my contact with Professor Thomas B. Smith, of the UCLA Center for Tropical Research-involving several serendipity aspects that assured me it was a green-light decision. Moreover, it was one, I believe, that would be fully endorsed by my husband (and one in which, I think, his spirit rejoices). How urgent it has become that dedicated researchers discover why so many precious species of plants and animals are vanishing, and in so doing, help to both save and restore them!

Various persons from the University have come to visit me and letters-even from the Chancellor-warmly express their appreciation of the gift. I treasure those responses and hope some part of me will be aware, after death, of whatever help has been contributed to the Center for Tropical Research of the UCLA Institute of the Environment.

Betty Franklin

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December 2002

West African Colleagues Visit CTR Lab
The CTR conservation genetics laboratory hosted a visit from two colleagues from West Africa during October and November, 2002. Dr. Blaise Kadjo and Mr. Bertin Akpatou, researchers at the Centre Suisse de Recherches Scientifiques in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, came to the lab to learn various techniques for understanding the molecular genetics of mammal and bird populations in their native country. They have been involved in field studies for a CTR research project focusing on the importance of evolutionary processes in ecological gradients that exist in riverine, montane, savannah and rainforest ecosystems in West Africa. UCLA graduate student, Debra Pires, facilitated training for Blaise and Bertin, who will apply their training to future research that will refine conservation policies and practices in their home country. During their stay in California, they also participated in the CTR workshop on Rainforest Diversification and Conservation, and had the opportunity to visit the UC Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology.

Blaise Kadjo (left) and Bertin Akpatou at work in the CTR molecular genetics laboratory

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November 2002

CTR Workshop on Rainforest Diversification and Conservation
For the past three years, CTR researchers and collaborating scientists have been working on an NSF-funded project to examine the importance of evolutionary processes in the generation and maintenance of biodiversity in tropical ecosystems. These forces seem especially strong along environmental gradients, such as those that exist between savannah and rainforest in West Africa and along gradients in the Andes.

On November 8th and 9th, CTR convened a gathering at UCLA to discuss the implications of the research findings for conservationof tropical ecosystems. Over forty people attended, including collaborating scientists from Boston University, UC Berkeley, University of Queensland, University of Cocody (Cote d'Ivoire), and JPL/NASA. Scientists gave short presentations on their findings, covering a broad spectrum of taxa (from frogs and lizards to birds and bats). Evidence of microevolutionary change was found in each of these taxa in a variety of morphological and behavioral traits, as well as in molecular genetic structure. Parallel work in Australia, West Africa, and Ecuador showed concordant patterns, indicating that many of the evolutionary processes responsible for generating tropical diversity are similar across continents.

In order to better understand the conservation implications of the research, and to maximize the impact of the research for conservation planning and policy, CTR invited representatives from nongovernmental environmental organizations and the donor community. Representatives from WWF (West Africa), Jatun Sacha (Ecuador), The Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation attended and provided valuable insight and an on-the-ground, practitioner's perspective for how the research can be applied to conservation efforts. A consensus was reached that evolutionary processes needed to be considered in addition to biodiversity 'hotspots', and that 'processes needed to be put on the map'.

Major outcomes of the workshop

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Center for Tropical Research workshop participants

Lizard Wizard
A study by CTR postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Ryan Calsbeek, created quite a stir in the popular media upon publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science on November 5th, 2002. In Ryan's words:

"My work on side-blotched lizards shows that female mate choice is about both the male¹s territory and his genes. Usually, large males and the best territory go hand in hand because larger males outcompete the smaller ones for the best bachelor pads. However, by experimentally manipulating territory quality, I was able to differentiate between female preferences for males and their resources. My colleague Barry Sinervo and I rearranged the territories of a population of side-blotched lizards, Ula stansburiana. We took rocks good for sheltering and sunning from the territories controlled by larger males and placed them in the territories of smaller males. We then recorded where the females chose to settle and with whom they mated. The females preferred to set up nests in the better territories, even if a smaller male controlled the area. The females, however, also mated with larger males outside of their chosen territory. We used the progeny's DNA to determine paternity, and we found that most male offspring were larger, sired by the larger lizard. Female offspring tended to be smaller and sired by the smaller territory owner. We show that this selective sperm utilization gives the female ultimate control over her mating choice and outcome, thus cementing female mate choice as a powerful form of sexual selection that shapes species over time."

The Associated Press has picked up the story and it can now be seen on CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, L.A. Times, Washington Post, Discovery Chanel, NPR, among other places. Please visit the following links for details:

http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/11/04/lizards.sex.ap/index.html

http://cbc.ca/stories/2002/11/04/lizard021104

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September 2002

CTR facilitates Memorandum of Agreement between UCLA and Ecuadorian University
On August 26, 2002 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Universidad de San Francisco de Quito (USFQ) formalized a cooperative academic agreement between the two institutions. This effort was spearheaded by Dr. Thomas B. Smith (Professor of Biology at UCLA and Director of Center for Tropical Research) and Dr. Santiago Gangotena (President of USFQ), both of whom are shown in the adjacent photo immediately after signing the agreement.

The agreement paves the way for increased collaboration and cooperation between the two prestigious institutions, including exchange of students, professors, and researchers as well as jointly developed academic symposia and curricula. The agreement particularly strengthens ties between the Center for Tropical Research, which is housed in UCLA's Institute of the Environment, and USFQ's Tiputini Biological Station, which is located in the Amazon basin, and the newly opened GAIA institute, on the Galapagos Islands. This will increase the quantity and quality of scientific research projects being conducted at these unique localities, benefiting both institutions and the scientific community in general.

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Left: Dr. Santiago Gangotena, President of thr Universidad San Francisco de Quito, signing academic agreement between UCLA and USFQ. Right: Dr. Thomas Smith and Dr. Santiago Gangotena immediately after signing the agreement.

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