Dr. Bethan Littleford‑Colquhoun was a postdoctoral researcher in the Kartzinel Lab (2020–2025) and a key driver of our NSF-funded Yellowstone wildlife research program in collaboration with the National Park Service. Her work uses dietary DNA metabarcoding and microbiome ecology to understand how wild herbivores respond to seasonal change and migration. She is now a faculty member in Microbiomics at the University of Bath.

Hannah Hoff, PhD candidate in the lab, has accepted a Blavatnik Family Graduate Fellowship in Biology & Medicine at Brown University. This is a highly competitive and well-deserved honor. Hannah has helped lead our work in Yellowstone National Park since 2021.

Led by Hannah Hoff, in collaboration with the National Park Service and the Brown University Herbarium, the lab just published a blockbuster paper that summarizes, critiques, and enhances how ecologists tend to talk about what wildlife eat. There are some surprising and potentially sensitive elements to the story—both for how we monitor and manage wildlife populations and for how we address our implicit biases when observing and reporting on wildlife as scientists.

It feels good to have more of the lab getting back into the swing of fieldwork after the worst years of the early pandemic! The lab has always maintained some field activity throughout the pandemic. Ezequiel Vanderhoeven had been working remote from field sites across Argentina; Robert Ang'ila and Peter Lokeny had been keeping active at Mpala in Kenya; Colin Donihue had led  the lizard team in field and lab studies across New England; Amanda Lyons led the terrapin conservation genomics team around the northeastern United States. But a lot of us had to cut back or go it alone more than we would have liked. The tide finally began to turn in 2022, though!