What is your team working on this summer?

We’ve been working on an urban gradient review, where we go through papers and extract data about how urban gradients are defined. And we’ve been photo-tagging for the Urban Wildlife Information Network.

Photo-tagging is really interesting. The UWIN studies transects going from the city centers to the more rural areas. The way they do this is by putting up a line of cameras over that distance, which are heat and motion sensitive. The cameras take photos of animals (and humans) that wander by. We go online and physically type in the name of what’s in the photo. So, the UWIN is this huge network which illustrates what is where and how it changes along the urban gradient. We’re photo-tagging for the St. Louis area. It’s interesting because I learned, ‘Oh, this animal is here? I know that park!’ ‘There’s a camera there? I go there!’

Do you find hope in your team’s work and have you had moments in the lab or in the field when hope was eclipsed by setbacks?

Oh sure, sure. I mean, when you are doing this kind of work, a lot of finding that hope is first figuring out what is wrong. That can be really depressing. I’ve been reading a lot of papers and most of them say where there’s urbanization, biodiversity decreases. That’s depressing. But the fact that we’re studying it is really important! It’s definitely hopeful that we’re trying to understand how urbanization affects all of the different plants and animals around us. That is going to be extremely important moving forward.