We have 4 new people joining the FAEL: Marie-Sophie Garcia-Heras is a new postdoc working on Marbled Murrelets, Rachel Zitomer is an incoming M.S. student focused on pollinators and forest management, Nicole Bell is an Honors College student examining pollen use by bees in burned areas, and Kendra Del Toro is an URSA Engage undergraduate awardee who is quantifying bee survival relative to wildfire severity. Welcome all!

Jim received funding from the College of Forestry to initate a study of the breeding ecology of the Black-backed Woodpecker in burned and unburned forests of southern Oregon. For reasons currently unknown, this species uses unburned forest for nesting in Oregon, a pattern that differs from other parts of its range in the western U.S. This work is being undertaken with co-PI Jake Verschuyl at NCASI and will get started in late spring 2018.

Our work examining the response of native bees to wildfire at the Douglas Fire Complex was recently highlighted by OPB. The story does a nice job summing up the lack of information regarding native pollinators in forested ecosystems and the need for additional research on this topic, particularly studies that assess links between managed forests and agricultural areas. Check out the full story here.

Members and affiliates of the FAEL, led by Joe Northrup, recently had a paper accepted in Marine Ornithology that tested the use of GPS tracking tags on Marbled Murrelets. This paper outlines the challenges of existing tags for fine-scale satellite tracking of murrelets and points to the need for the development of smaller, lower profile tags in the future.