Why Frogs?
Motivation and General Significance
- Declines in amphibian populations have been reported around the world.
- There is a growing recognition about the need for long-term monitoring of amphibian populations to understand the nature and the causes of such declines.
- Quantitative approaches (e.g., mathematical, statistical, and computational techniques) are needed to translate some of the long-term-monitoring data into useful information.
Questions Related to the Population Under Study
- How does the population of the green treefrogs in our field site change over time?
- How does calling activity relate to changes in population size?
- What factors, if any, limit the population size of green treefrogs in this system?
- What are the population dynamics of the tadpole life-history stage?
- What are the survivorship rates of tadpoles and frogs in this system?
- How do frogs grow in length over time to reach sexual maturity?
- Can frog calling activity be predicted by using weather?
Current Research Activities
- Capture-mark-recapture of green treefrogs with alpha-numeric tags. This experiment has been going on since 2004.
- Developing statistical model to estimate frog population size from the capture-mark-recapture field data.
- Developing a stage-structured mathematical model to predict the dynamics of this population.
- Using the statistical population estimations and the mathematical model in a least squares approach to infer information about survivorship rates of tadpoles and frogs.
- Deriving a mean growth rate curve from the length measurements obtained in the field.
Why Irises?
Motivation and General Significance
- Wetland habitats are among the most productive yet fragile ecosystems on the planet.
- Coastal ecosystems are directly impacted by the largest sources of contemporary environmental disturbance - climate change and humans.
- Iris populations are ancient and have adapted to changing environments for milennia.
- Iris is a good model to experimentally test hypotheses about ecological, physiological, and evolutionary processes.
Many Conservation-related Questions
- Do native and invasive plants compete with each other?
- How do native and invasive plants cope with environmental stress such as hurricanes and salinity?
- Does environmental stress influence ecological interactions and population dynamics of native and invasive plant?
Research Activities
- Measuring plant performance and physiology
- Observing ecological interactions
- Observing invasive species of iris
- Making predictions using quantitative modeling