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.

There is a fascinating population of Italian Wall Lizards living in Boston's Fenway Gardens. Even during the height of the pandemic, members of the Lizard Team were able to do some fieldwork observing and tracking the lizard population at this novel site for the species. In the first of several publications the team is leading from this time, we recently published a Natural History Note in Herpetological Review describing a couple of instances of avian predation observed: a hawk and a grackle separately preyed on individuals from this population. The population has only been around for a short number of years, and there are no native lizards in this region, so this represented novel predatory behaviors on a no-analog lizard population in the region. Scroll to page 500 of this Issue of Herpetological Review for some interesting observation and incredible photos published! 

Amanda Lyons and Bianca Brown braved the rainy weather to kick off our terrapin field season. Diamondback terrapins are the only "critically imperiled" reptile in Rhode Island, and a major conservation priority for the state. Amanda and Bianca were joined by our collaborators from the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management and The Roger Williams Park Zoo. Our research goal is to understand how genetically interconnected are the remaining few terrapin populations in the state, and relatedness to populations from neighboring states. This research is supported in part by a 2019 Voss Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Environmental Science and Communication to Amanda Lyons. Congratulations Amanda, and thanks IBES for supporting this research. 

Several members of the lab are just back from an extremely productive field trip. Highlights include a DNA barcoding workshop at the National Museums of Kenya (led by Tyler Kartzinel and of Brown University Brian Gill, and Director Paul Musili from the East African Herbarium), many pre-dawn captures of small mammals (led by Bianca Brown and collaborators from the Goheen lab), and many trees and and megaherbivores counted (led by Brian Gill and Peter Lokeny). Now the team is breaking in the new lab -- copious amounts of data to report soon! Photos of the highlights are below.