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.

Congratulations to Bianca Brown, microbiome scientist extraordinaire, on her publication appearing today in Ecosphere! Spatiotemporal variation in the gut microbiomes of co-occurring wild rodent species is freely available via open access. It is a rare example of the type of insightful work that can develop through collaborations involving field, lab, and big-data analytical approaches to really understand what's going on with wildlife. It is part of our long-term collaboration with the UHURU project at Mpala Research Centre in Kenya.

The paper led by Brian Gill on individual-level tracking of elephant diets -- Foraging History of Individual Elephants Using DNA Metabarcoding -- was just published by Royal Society Open Science. We are very proud of this paper, which revisits a set of classic studies on seasonal diet switching by elephants using stable isotopes in hair that were led by coauthors Thure Cerling and George Wittemeyer. The work was made possible with support in the field from Save the Elephants and with the botanical expertise of coauthor Paul Musili from the National Museums of Kenya.

The paper was accompanied by a great summary by Corrie Pikul and featured on the Brown University homepage: Similar to Humans, Elephants Vary What they Eat for Dinner. 

The paper also attracted attention in the media, including interviews on BBC Television and Times Radio. Some nice coverage of the study was also provided by BBC (with hilarious photos), Newsweek, ZME Science, and The Times. 

Bianca Brown published a paper entitled Host phylogeny and functional traits differentiate gut microbiomes in a diverse natural community of small mammals in Molecular Ecology. This paper was the result of a major collaborative effort that benefited from Bianca's insight, creativity, and leadership. This post summarizes the paper that emerged from the Kartzinel Lab's long-term research on food webs in African savannas.

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.