At dawn in the wetlands of East Africa, cranes stand majestically against the backdrop of sunlight beaming through the mist. These kinds of landscapes are changing quickly as water regimes shift, grazing pressure increases, and we increasingly subdivide habitats that once seemed indefinite.

For the species that depend on wetlands across the continent, questions about their future increasingly focus on how these kinds of magical places will remain connected. Former Kartzinel Lab postdoc Mary Burak has just taken on a leadership role to connect science, strategy, and action in this domain—she has been appointed Chief Scientist of the International Crane Foundation in Africa.

A new Kartzinel Lab data release, built with partners across Central and South America, is creating the reference tools needed to identify parasitic worms (helminths) that infect wildlife using DNA barcoding. HelmBank links expertly identified and voucher-backed parasite specimens to host species and geographic data—so conservation biologists, wildlife veterinarians, and molecular ecologists can translate parasite detections from sick or free-ranging animals into reliable data.

First public release of HelmBank strengthens parasite detection for Neotropical mammals
Release R1 publishes 45 parasite DNA barcode sequences, drawn from a larger working collection of more than 100 specimens. Hosts represented across HelmBank already include big cats (ocelot, jaguar, puma), foxes, tapirs, peccaries, sloths, armadillos, anteaters, and opossums—a cross-section of wildlife central to conservation and wildlife health programs across the region.

Why this matters for conservation, wildlife health, and One Health
DNA-based monitoring is increasingly used to study diets, microbiomes, and pathogens—but parasites are often left out because reference datasets are missing or too geographically mismatched to support confident identification. HelmBank is designed to close that gap by building a rigorously curated "field guide" for molecular parasitology—improving comparability across studies and strengthening our ability to monitor disease risk, which is especially important for both conservation and public health in areas where wildlife, livestock, and humans share landscapes.

An article by science journalist Livi Milloway chronicles an "ah-ha" moment we had in our Yellowstone National Park research project. The story published in The Wildlife Society Bulletin, titled An herbivore by any other name, unpacks how Hannah Hoff's recent paper in PNAS challenges the status quo when it comes to how scientists study and understand wildlife diets. 

Ezequiel Vanderhoeven from the Kartzinel Lab at Brown University 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. Knowledge of how they move and find enough to eat in their modern habitats will be essential for developing lasting conservation strategies.

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

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.