School of Natural Resources Seminar Series
Teasing apart among and within city variation in urban biodiversity through a large-scale, multi-city collaboration
3:30 pm –
4:30 pm
Hardin Hall
Room: 107 South (Auditorium)
3310 Holdrege St
Lincoln NE 68583
Lincoln NE 68583
Additional Info: HARH
Contact:
Gabriela Palomo, gabriela.palomo@huskers.unl.edu
Presented by Mason Fidino, Quantitative Ecologist with the Lincoln Park Zoo and Urban Wildlife Institute.
We live on an urban planet, and in no place is this more apparent than in the world’s cities. As urban environments are one of the fastest growing ecosystems on earth, they represent a unique opportunity for science, especially for ecology and conservation. Yet, one central limitation of most urban ecological studies is that they are conducted within single cities. Afterall, cities vary in age, topography, geographic location, zoning, population density, and many other factors. Because biodiversity likely responds to this among-city variation, it is difficult to extrapolate findings from one city to another. As such, my colleagues and I at the Lincoln Park Zoo started the Urban Wildlife Information Network (UWIN), a systematic, collaborative multi-city biodiversity monitoring survey that spans over 35 cities and 3 continents. In this talk I will discuss our first and most widespread sampling efforts, which revolve around using motion-triggered trail cameras. I will share some of the published research from our network and discuss some difficulties—or opportunities, depending on how you look at it—associated to modeling multi-city data.
Dr. Mason Fidino is an ecologist who works at the Urban Wildlife Institute at the Lincoln Park Zoo. His research lies on the intersection of urban ecology and biodiversity informatics. He combines large and complex data sources, creates new quantitative techniques, and fiddles around on computers an awful lot to determine how biodiversity responds to environmental change across multiple spatiotemporal scales. He also says to be interested in understanding ecological principles in urban environments and believes that cities are an important and overlooked part of the landscape that can conserve biodiversity. On top of his own research, he is also the analytics advisor for the Urban Wildlife Information Network (UWIN), which is an international network of researchers who systematically collect data on wildlife distributions along urbanization gradients in different cities. In this role he ensures that the integrity of the data that is collected across UWIN and provides statistical support to UWIN members. In 2017 he obtained a PhD degree in Ecology and Evolution at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
We live on an urban planet, and in no place is this more apparent than in the world’s cities. As urban environments are one of the fastest growing ecosystems on earth, they represent a unique opportunity for science, especially for ecology and conservation. Yet, one central limitation of most urban ecological studies is that they are conducted within single cities. Afterall, cities vary in age, topography, geographic location, zoning, population density, and many other factors. Because biodiversity likely responds to this among-city variation, it is difficult to extrapolate findings from one city to another. As such, my colleagues and I at the Lincoln Park Zoo started the Urban Wildlife Information Network (UWIN), a systematic, collaborative multi-city biodiversity monitoring survey that spans over 35 cities and 3 continents. In this talk I will discuss our first and most widespread sampling efforts, which revolve around using motion-triggered trail cameras. I will share some of the published research from our network and discuss some difficulties—or opportunities, depending on how you look at it—associated to modeling multi-city data.
Dr. Mason Fidino is an ecologist who works at the Urban Wildlife Institute at the Lincoln Park Zoo. His research lies on the intersection of urban ecology and biodiversity informatics. He combines large and complex data sources, creates new quantitative techniques, and fiddles around on computers an awful lot to determine how biodiversity responds to environmental change across multiple spatiotemporal scales. He also says to be interested in understanding ecological principles in urban environments and believes that cities are an important and overlooked part of the landscape that can conserve biodiversity. On top of his own research, he is also the analytics advisor for the Urban Wildlife Information Network (UWIN), which is an international network of researchers who systematically collect data on wildlife distributions along urbanization gradients in different cities. In this role he ensures that the integrity of the data that is collected across UWIN and provides statistical support to UWIN members. In 2017 he obtained a PhD degree in Ecology and Evolution at the University of Illinois at Chicago.