Dr. Jacob Barney, will offer BIOLOGICAL INVASIONS, PPWS 4604 and 5604G, during fall semester 2014. The course will explore the historical, conceptual, mechanistic, societal, and political components of invasive species. The course begins with Darwin and ends with the “Homogocene”, covering the invasion process from introduction to ecological or economic impact and all components in between.
Dr. Paul Angermeier and Dr. Amy Vilamagna will be offering a new course in the upcoming spring semester. The course, Biodiversity Conservation and Environmental Sustainability: Interfacing Ecological and Social Sciences, will examinee the history, theories, current status, and future prospects, given ongoing global changes, of biodiversity conservation as a societal enterprise.
The course will emphasize the study, practice, and scientific and socioeconomic contexts of conservation, especially as it relates to emerging goals for sustainability. It will synthesize ecological, socioeconomic, and cultural perspectives as it explores cross-institutional and cross-disciplinary approaches to conservation. Students will be encouraged to consider how they might engage science, policy, and other professionals in achieving conservation goals.
Read the complete course description here (PDF).
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Are you a PhD student interested in exploring interdisciplinary graduate education in Global Change?
Applicants for the Interfaces of Global Change IGEP should submit the following materials to Gloria Schoenholtz, IGC Program Coordinator (schoeng@vt.edu):
1. A CV that includes your GPA and GRE scores (and TOEFL scores for international applicants).
2. Contact information for three letters of reference
3. A brief letter of support from the prospective Ph.D. mentor(s) explaining a) how the applicant’s training will benefit from the IGC IGEP, and b) an explicit funding plan that describes how stipend, tuition, and research expenses will be covered over the course of the applicant’s tenure at Virginia Tech. If Departmental support is part of the funding plan (e.g., a GTAs), appropriate written verification should be provided (e.g., signature of support from dept. head).
4. A cover letter (see details below) In your 1-page cover letter, please address these questions: What faculty member(s) will you be working with and what will be your home department? What kind of interdisciplinary research will you be doing that relates to the Interfaces of Global Change program? How will the Interfaces of Global Change IGEP benefit your career plans? Do you need to be considered for one of the 1-year GRA awards*?
First review of applicants for the 2013-2014 IGC cohort will begin April 30, 2013. Applications will continue to be considered until August 1, 2013.
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Image credit: U.S. Global Change Research Program (www.globalchange.gov)
A new seminar course has been added to the graduate curriculum at Virginia Tech. Open to all PhD students from across campus, FIW 5004: Global Change Seminar will be conducted as a brown bag discussion of primary literature on how major threats to global biodiversity interact to affect the environment and how science can inform public policy to influence these interactions. Students will be required to read and discuss primary literature with their peers and the IGC Faculty each week.
This one credit seminar will be offered annually each fall semester. During Fall 2013, the class will meet on Mondays from 5:30-7:00 p.m., in 311 Latham Hall.
Click here to download the flyer (PDF).
Bill Hopkins, professor in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation and Director of the Global Change Center, talks about eastern hellbenders and their ecological importance in this Virginia Tech field interview.
Sixteen affiliated faculty members from Virginia Tech, representing 6 colleges and 10 departments, recently received Graduate School funding to support an interdisciplinary graduate education program (IGEP) in global change. The new Interfaces of Global Change (IGC IGEP) will address the multidimensional aspects of global change and provide the next generation of scientists with a unique perspective and skill set to address the most challenging environmental issues facing society today.
September 21, 2015
Today, Virginia Tech’s College of Natural Resources and Environment officially opens its new Research Aviary, one of few such university facilities in the region.
“Virginia Tech has incredible strengths in avian biology, ecology, and conservation in the College of Natural Resources and Environment and in biological sciences in the College of Science,” said William Hopkins, professor of fish and wildlife conservation and an expert in the physiological ecology of amphibians, reptiles, and birds.
“In the past, we have relied on field work and lab experiments, but some critical questions require intermediate conditions, where captive birds are able to fly and behave in social groups. That requires a facility where we have some control but also seminatural conditions,” he added.
The aviary was funded by the College of Natural Resources and Environment and the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation but is being used for collaborations with other colleges and universities in order to study many bird species.
The facility is unique in that it has 16 replicated aviary rooms. “We can conduct experiments and replicate them in statistically robust designs,” Hopkins said. “Each room can house a small flock of songbirds, such as finches, sparrows, and starlings, or can house family groups of species like wood ducks so we can observe pairs raising their young, for instance.”
Other features include partial roofing of each room with an outer, mesh-enclosed area so the birds can experience daylight cycles and natural temperature changes but remain sheltered from extreme weather. The birds can be observed through one-way glass panels.
Hopkins recently finished his first experiment in the aviary, a study of how embryonic developmental conditions for wood ducks affect the hatchlings. Earlier research by his team has demonstrated that incubation temperature affects growth, the ability to regulate body temperature, the immune system, and the endocrine system. As little as 1 degree Celsius below normal, such as can happen if the mother leaves the nest for too long to forage, can have a detrimental effect.
“But the earlier work was confined to the lab, so we were limited to raising ducklings for three weeks,” Hopkins said. “We don’t know how long the effects last, such as whether they affect the chicks’ ability to mature and reproduce. The aviary allows us to follow the hatchlings to maturity.”
As part of this project, wildlife master’s degree student Sydney Hope of Howell, New Jersey, the recent recipient of a prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, is studying the effect that changes in incubation temperature has on behaviors important to survival.
In addition to studies by Hopkins and his students, researchers in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences are interested in determining whether invasive species of plants are dispersed by birds. Likewise, Associate Professor Dana Hawley in the College of Science is studying the social dynamics of house finches and disease transmission. “In time, we will accommodate a lot of other species,” Hopkins said.
One of the biggest perks of the new facility is the educational benefits for graduate and undergraduate students. “Captive bird study creates opportunities for undergraduates to do research,” Hopkins said. “Birds are high-maintenance study subjects, so we need a lot of hands to help care for the animals. This animal husbandry provides entry-level training for undergraduates, which sometimes leads to independent study, and even a senior thesis in my lab.”
Hopkins, who is a Fralin Life Science Institute affiliate and director of the Global Change Center, leads both an undergraduate research program and an interdisciplinary graduate program that are among the programs that will utilize this new facility. “I am thrilled that the college has invested in infrastructure that can simultaneously advance our research and educational missions,” he said.
Researchers from Virginia Tech’s College of Natural Resources and Environment have received a $3.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of the Interior to study the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on piping plovers, shorebirds that have been listed as threatened since 1986.
Breeding populations of piping plovers exist in three distinct locations — the Atlantic Coast, the American and Canadian Great Plains, and the Great Lakes — but birds from all three populations use the Gulf shore as overwintering habitat.
Anticipating the spill’s implications for the plover population, the Virginia Tech team began work on the grant application within days of the explosion that caused the oil spill. The first two boats and their crews left Blacksburg for the Gulf the day after the team received notification that its grant proposal had been funded. By the following week, a full team of 28 researchers was collecting data on site.
The team, from the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Sciences, includes faculty members James Fraser, Sarah Karpanty, and Bill Hopkins, research scientists Daniel Catlin and Jonathan Cohen, and Joy Felio of Blacksburg, Va., a master’s student in fisheries and wildlife sciences.
When completed, the research will provide data upon which litigators can base settlements for the damage lawsuits resulting from the oil spill. In order to factor damage to plover habitat into these settlements, litigators must know whether and by how much plover survival and migration patterns have changed since the spill.
Fraser, however, says he would like to see the research used for more than just litigation purposes. “Our real hope,” he said, “is that our data will be used for restoration efforts. We want our research to help people think toward the future.”
The study will measure survival and migration patterns by comparing rates of survival and emigration in oiled and unoiled areas of the Gulf. Study sites will be limited to areas that historically have had a large number of overwintering plovers.
The team will use a mark-recapture study — a study in which birds are captured and tagged so that researchers can estimate population characteristics based on the proportion of tagged birds that can be recaptured — to evaluate the plovers’ survival and emigration rates. A separate survey will determine the percentage of plovers that have been oiled as a result of the spill.
The present study is funded by the Interior Department’s Natural Resource Damage Assessment Program only through the end of the plovers’ spring migration in April, but Fraser, who has been studying piping plovers since they were first listed as threatened in 1986, and Karpanty, who has studied migratory shorebirds for the past six years, say they plan to pursue funding to extend the research.
“Because the spill was an emergency, the funding came late, and the birds were already on the Gulf when we got there,” explained Fraser. “I’m very proud of the fact that we were down there the day after we had funding, but it’s possible that birds died before we began to take data.”
The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 20, 2010, killed 11 of the 126 workers on board and released 4 to 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico before the well was permanently sealed on Sept. 19. Currently, surface oil affects coastal areas from western Louisiana to Pensacola, Fla., with some tar balls appearing as far west as Galveston, Texas. The area’s natural oil-eating microbes, which are abundant partly because smaller spills occur so often in the Gulf, and strong sunlight, which increases photooxidation, offer hope for recovery, but the prognosis for the affected area is still uncertain.
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