The magazine Medicine@Brown featured Montana Stone's award-winning photo of "Zorro" -- a culpeo fox -- taken at our long-term ecological research site in Fray Jorge National Park in Chile. It's a fantastic shot of an amazing, and poorly known predator. As the BioMed communications team said, this image from Montana's field work is a poignant way to remind people that our mission in the Division is to advance the "health of people AND planet." We always love to remind people that our health is intimately, and inextricably, linked to what's happening in nature and around the planet.

With some much-anticipated fanfare in a press release from Uppsala University, Elin led a paper on describing the diets and microbiomes of three giraffe species that all live in close proximity to each other around the equator in Kenya. This work was initiated together with Brian Gill and Peter Lokeny many years ago.

This paper involved close collaboration with colleagues at the Mpala Research Centre, The National Museums of Kenya, and Giraffe Conservation Foundation. It represents a meaningful step toward better understanding the ecology of these amazing, but poorly understood endangered species -- and it directly informs on-the-ground conservation efforts aimed at ensuring long-term access to nutritious resources to fuel the recovery of populations.

The original article was published open access in Global Ecology and Conservation and the press release is entitled "Unexpected discoveries in study of giraffe gut flora."

Earlier this month, Mary Burak led a workshop together with Save the Elephants and the National Museums of Kenya. The meeting convened at the Save the Elephants headquarters at Samburu, and the team spent a few days learning to collect voucher plant specimens for DNA barcoding. In a very short period of time, they added an important chunk of regional plant diversity to the collections available for barcoding. The training and work completed will dramatically increase our ability to precisely characterize the diets of elephants across Kenya. It was super gratifying to see such a great group of scholars, conservationists, long-time collaborators, and all-around quality people coming together to do such important work. Mary shared some great photos of the team in action: Paul Musili, Rispa Kathurima, Gideon Galimogle, and Evans Nawasa.

The lab is incredibly excited to welcome Mary Burak! Mary is joining the lab as a Fulbright Scholar based in Kenya followed by an IBES Voss Postdoctoral Fellowship. Together these prestigious awards will support Mary for three years both in Kenya and at Brown. Mary will collaborate with a number of major NGOs as well as scholars at the University of Nairobi, the National Museums of Kenya, and Mpala Research Centre to address critical data needs for the conservation of large carnivores and herbivores across Kenya. 

Mary completed a PhD in Os Schmitz's lab at Yale University in 2023. She is a star and we are so keen to learn from her and collaborate with her over the next few years and beyond!

Congratulations to Maddy for being one of only two undergraduates to be recognized with a prestigious Caleel '87 Memorial Undergraduate Biology Research Fellowship from the Division of Biology and Medicine at Brown in 2023! To prepare for her senior thesis next year, Maddy plans to spend the summer studying the health and nutrition of sloths in Costa Rica where she'll be based at La Selva. Exciting work will come from this incredible opportunity ahead!

Late last year, Ezequiel participated in the capture of the first two Giant Armadillos from Argentina. The animals were sampled and outfitted with tracking devices to understand more about the health and ecology of their population. This amazing species is very rare, and its global population is listed as Vulnerable and Declining on the Red List of Endangered Species.

An article was published entitled, "Rosenda, la primera tatú carreta monitoreada en el Chaco"

Great work, Ezequiel! 

We were honored to have Haldre Rogers join the lab during her visit this week. We are huge fans of Haldre -- not only did she give a phenomenal EEOB departmental seminar, but she hung out for a few days to work with us and connect with students. Each year that I teach my 'Conservation genomics' course, we partner with external collaborators to address a real-world conservation problem through our semester-long research projects. This year, one group has entered a collaboration with Haldre and her network of collaborators to better understand the ecology of bird loss in the Northern Mariana Islands. By the end of the year, we plan to report back on the diets of remnant bird populations using dietary DNA metabarcoding methods. We just finished PCR week, and Haldre joined us to do some pipetting!

Congratulations to Dr. Ezequiel Vanderhoeven for your Rufford Foundation Grant! Ezequiel plans to study infectious diseases circulating in populations of armadillo species native to the Argentinian Chaco. The goal of the study is to understand how diseases impact populations of these species for the benefit of conservation and to support local governments and communities in the adoption of environmental practices that minimize the risk of spillover. It is an extremely important and ambitious project. The Rufford award not only provides crucial financial support, but also represents a valuable endorsement of the work from a leading international authority on applied conservation biology.