Student Summer Research
      Marina Blanco, a graduate student working with Laurie Godfrey in the Anthropology Department, continued her work on dental topographic analysis of mouse and dwarf lemurs (cheirogaleids). Dental casts of lemurs have been widely collected and are available for taxonomic comparison.  The technique is detailed enough to distinguish among populations of lemurs and can be applied to living specimens (caught and released) as well as specimens from museum drawers. 
     Marina and her associates have already demonstrated the likely survival in eastern Madagascar of a species of dwarf lemur previously known only from a few museum specimens. A further goal is to develop a series showing dental wear with age (as has been done for woolly lemurs and howler monkeys.  This will yield demographic data on population structures. During summer 2007 she made casts of specimens and worked on 3D image analysis.
      She is returning to Madagascar in October to obtain more casts which she and her colleagues will use for further taxonomic analysis and to develop a dental-wear-based age series for the cheirogaleids as has been done with other lemurs.   Her work is supported in part by a scholarship from the David J. Klingener Fund.  

     Rodger Gwiazdowski, from Ben Normark’s lab in Plant, Soil, and Insect Sciences, spent late August through late October 2007 traveling to remote locations in almost every state of Mexico to collect frozen tissue samples and herbarium specimens of endemic species of Pinus spp. and associated scale insects. Nearly all of the samples have been collected from native locations, representing most of the endemic species of Mexico including Pinus species rarely seen in collections such as, Pinus culminicola, P. maximartinezii, P. nelsonii and P. pinceana.
     He collaborated with researchers working on Pinus systematics and evolution from both the United States and Mexico including the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, the University of Arizona, Tucson, the University of California, Davis, Universidad de Guadalajara, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM, Mexico City) and the Instituto de Ecología, A.C. (INECOL) from both the states of Veracruz and Durango. The collecting generated 115 samples of pine tissue and associated scale insects and 35 herbarium specimens with associated cones, which will be deposited with the UMass Natural History Collections.   

     Mike Jones continued his research on wood turtles in the Connecticut River valley and expanded the project to include portions of the White Mountain National Forest in northern New Hampshire. He radiotracked 50 adult wood turtles (Glyptemys insculpta) in six different streams and observed a relatively high adult mortality rate of 10%, mostly due to agricultural machinery. This is further evidence that wood turtle populations in New England are probably declining faster than previously thought. One male wood turtle moved a record 16 km straight-line indicating that long-range dispersal, while rare, is an important component of population connectivity. Several turtles were displaced more than 10 km by a severe flood in April.
     Additionally, Mike continued a collaboration with the UMass Computer Science Department to construct and deploy solar-powered GPS units on snapping turtles. This collaboration began in 2005 and will continue next year. The individual GPS units and base stations have been completed after two years of construction and testing and are ready for maintenance-free deployment. These units were constructed with the ultimate purpose of placing them on rare and relatively unknown species in remote areas.
     Mike is a student in the Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Program, working with Paul Sievert and Al Richmond.  His work is supported by a scholarship from the David J. Klingener Fund.

      Sydne Record compared New England and midwestern populations of Pedicularis lanceolata (Swamp Wood-Betony) which is a root parasite.  Her goals are to determine if this rare plant is more flexible in its choice of hosts at the edge of its range (New England) compared to the core (the midwest) and if there is a preference for native vs. invasive species as host in the edge vs. the core areas. During this summer she collected data on Pedicularis and the plants associated with it in 22 locations in the midwest and New England along with leaf samples for DNA analysis.  She also searched the UMass Herbarium collections for information on historic locations and plants found in association with Pedicularis. Halfway through her study now, more field trips, herbarium work, and statistical and DNA analysis are yet to come before she has some answers.
      Sydne is a Plant Biology Program student, working with Aaron Ellison of the Harvard Forest. Here work is supported by the Jane H. Bemis Endowment for Research in Natural History.

      Liz Willey, an OEB graduate student, has just completed her third year of field studies on Eastern box turtles (Terrapene c. carolina) listed as a Species of Special Concern in Massachusetts by the Mass Wildlife Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program. Working with Paul Seivert, in the Natural Resources and Conservation Department, their goal is to develop a conservation plan for the species with recommendations for land acquisition priorities and land management strategies. They plan to determine the location and relative viability of populations through surveys, evaluate habitat use and movement data via radio-telemetry, and identify threats to the species. During the past summer they continued to monitor 35 individuals in four known areas, surveyed new sites, and placed transmitters on 20 new individuals at three new telemetry sites across the valley. The new sites allowed them to improve their understanding of habitat use and to evaluate the effects of landscape variation on the home range size and movement patterns of animals across populations. The new data will also be used to improve their GIS based habitat suitability model during the winter season and to help identify new survey priorities for the 2008 field season
     Willey's work was supported by funding from the David J. Klingener Fund.

Our Curators
     Karen Searcy, Curator of the Herbarium, has just about completed a flora of the Mount Holyoke Range that will be published as a special publication by the New England Botanical Society.  It should be available in the late fall.   She has also produced an electronic field guide for many of spring wildflowers found in the Range.  It can be viewed at http://efg.cs.umb.edu/holyoke/.
      Searcy also recently received a grant from the Mass Wildlife Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program , to do a biological resources survey of Robinson State Park focused on rare plants and priority natural plant communities. Robinson State Park in Agawam, Massachusetts, was established in 1934. It extends for about 5 miles along the Westfield River and has over 800 acres including a 17-acre island in the Westfield River. Although it is surrounded by suburban development the park has known populations of three rare species and what may be the northern most site for a significant population of Tulip-tree (Liriodendron tulipifera). The work will be done with three graduate students, one from the Plant Biology Graduate Program and two from the Natural Resources Conservation Graduate Program.

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