Dr. Richard Feldman, Wildlife Landscape Ecologist Ontario Ministry of Northern Development, Mines, Natural Resources, and Forestry Peterborough, Ontario My pandemic year birding an urban tropical forest and reflections on seven years in the Yucatan Peninsula During the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, I had the good fortune to be able to conduct weekly bird surveys in a local tropical forest fragment in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. While most of the urban bird assemblage changed little through the year, every visit still brought surprises as non-urban birds still sometimes wandered into the middle of the city. While birding, I could reflect on the research my students and I have conducted in the Yucatan, attempting to understand how communities change across the Peninsula and across seasons. For example, we have found that, during migration, migratory bird species richness is decoupled from local habitat productivity and individual habitat use is unrelated to local resource availability. However, during winter, species redistribute themselves to match productivity gradients. For the talk, I hope you can explore with me how ecological patterns in a region shaped by spatial and temporal variation in precipitation differ from regions shaped by temperature and get to know a place where some Ontario birds spend the winter.
Bio: Richard is currently a Wildlife Landscape Ecologist with the Ontario Ministry of Northern Development, Mines, Natural Resources, and Forestry in Peterborough, Ontario. He has only just started the position after having spent seven years as a research scientist in the Yucatan Center for Scientific Research in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. He is an alumnus of Queen’s, having graduated in Biology in 1999. He then went on to complete a Master’s in Forest Science at the University of British Columbia, a PhD at McGill, and post-docs at Trent and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His main research interest is understanding how the response of species to fine-scale environmental variation depends on broader spatial and temporal gradients, such as latitude and seasons. He uses concepts and tools from landscape genetics, behavioural ecology, community ecology, and macroecology. Comments are closed.
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