AVIAN ECOLOGY AND WILDLIFE CONSERVATION

Kathryn E. Sieving, Professor

Department of Wildlife Ecology & Conservation

University of Florida

B.Sc. (’82) Wildlife, Fish, & Conservation Biology

University of California Davis

Ph.D. (’91) Ecology, Ethology, & Evolution

University of Illinois

Links of Interest

My Favorite Picks at the Moment

@ Natural History Network

@ National Phenology Network

Best Bird Conservation NGO!

Send your MONEY to:

American Bird Conservancy

(In my opinion -- they ROCK!)

@ American Bird Conservancy

@ Florida Ornithological Society

Resources for Students

@ Readings for My courses

@ UF Major / Minor in Sustainability Studies

@ Guide for Undergrad / Honors Theses!

@ Web GU.R.U. – NSF guide to Undergraduate Research

@ Find Bird Jobs and $$ for Bird Research

@ Find Jobs (volunteer / paid) for Experience

@ How to Write a ‘Curriculum Vita’ (academic resume)

Sieving Publications

List

Sieving Lab Research Interests

My research program focuses on conserving forest biodiversity, especially birds, in disturbed, fragmented, and otherwise human-dominated landscapes in historically forested biomes. This focus has led me to integrate biodiversity conservation in agricultural and other types of rural lands, close and far from protected areas. Conceptually, my lab’s work is rooted in community, behavioral, and landscape ecology. Functionally, the over-riding theme in my lab is ‘effective conservation science via rigorous research design’.

My graduate, undergraduate, and post-doctoral scholars’ interests define the collective interests of my lab. Current bird people in the lab are working in fragmented and/or logged forests in Florida, Brasil, and Sumatra. The taxonomic breadth of the lab includes the behavioral landscape ecology of insects (dragonflies and bees), primates (Cambodia, Brasil), and mammalian carnivore-prey systems (Chile; domestic dogs preying on a wee deer called Pudu). My doctoral students all fund their own research programs, but their collaborative teamwork within the lab is a requirement and helps us all to do better, and keep it together…!

Behavioral Landscape Ecology of Forest Birds and Mammals

Assessing Landscape Structure: From the animals’ points of view (i.e., one bird’s habitat is another bird’s hell)

Principles of ‘Behavioral Landscape Ecology’ are fundamental to understanding the distribution and viability of wildlife populations. Behavioral mechanisms help determine spatial distributions of animals and their responses to landscape change (short and long term) and disturbance. We use behavioral ecology to understand animal movements, activities, and distribution in disturbed landscapes and have found that landscape connectivity is defined by a species behavioral perceptions of risks and rewards in spatial decision-making, and is greatly influenced by spatial configuration of habitat (e.g., corridors, boundaries, and matrix) and by the presence and activities of other species at local and landscape scales.

My lab is currently pursuing patterns and mechanisms underlying landscape scale distributions of bird and other animal species, and regional approaches to landscape design for biodiversity protection in forests of Chile, Sumatra (Harapan Rainforest), Brasil (Acre State), and Florida. See publications 10, 12, 20, 21, 26, 27, 30, 31.

This work has been funded by National Geographic Society; National Science Foundation; Disney Conservation Fund; University of Florida; Animal Behavior Society; Conservation Leadership Program; US Fish & Wildlife Service; others.

Information Landscapes – The Unseen World of Animal Landscape Ecology

Titmouse Anti-Predator Communication: An informative signaling system reaching a large network of species, affecting spatial decision-making.

We’ve discovered that the Eastern Tufted Titmouse encodes tremendous precision and diversity of information about predation threats they perceive in their alarm calls and other vocalizations (including their chip calls). And, MANY other species not only know the titmouse code, they change their behaviors in accordance with the degree of threat conveyed in those calls. We are exploring how ‘info-scapes’ generated by widespread and abundant parids influences the ‘behavioral connectivity’ of complex landscapes for eavesdropping species. For an overview, see Fletcher and Sieving, 2010; Sieving et al., 2010; Hetrick and Sieving 2011.