A team of SCALE lab members excavated the remains of a horse on Driftwood Beach on Jekyll Island, Georgia. Over the next few months, we will work on obtaining radiocarbon dates with the Center for Applied Isotope Studies at the University of Georgia. Stay tuned for updates!
Jessy finished her last field season in Namibia for her dissertation work. She is still continuing to collect data for a few months, but the countdown begins until she defends her dissertation next year!
Jessy was in Namibia for a month, collaring hyenas and setting up the lighting experiment to test the effects of artificial lighting on African mammal behavior. She spent a lot of time analyzing data for a project on lion movement based on moonlight and trained a new technician.
This work continued our focus on understanding subsurface topography on the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center as well as new excavations on the Brunswick Golden Isles Airport. We used cores and test excavations and identified new localities for formal excavations.
Congrats are in order for Atticus Tomcho after he was awarded a NSF GRFP, which will provide his entire funding throughout a PhD program.
Update: Atticus was accepted into a PhD program in the Geography and Geology Departments at The University of Georgia under the direction of Dr. Suzy Pilaar Birch! We are proud of his hard work!
This trip focused on creating a three dimensional model of paleolandscape features. Our team completed ~50 cores to document subsurface features and elucidate the extent and dynamics of fossil bearing layers on the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick Georgia.
Jessy, Anna Cronan, and Atticus Tomcho presented at the national Wildlife Society Conference in Louisville, Kentucky. Anna gave her very first oral presentation at a national conference on the effects of neonicotinoids on toad survival and development. Atticus presented a poster on bait type efficacy, and Jessy gave an oral presentation on the effects of human presence on diel activity patterns for African mammals. Great work team!
Our work focused on excavations and coring lateral to our existing excavations at Clark Quarry. We found many new promising localities to focus our more formal excavations.
Taylor Malasek's thesis on white-tailed deer ecology was published in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. This work centers on understanding the fidelity of enamel isotopic data and environmental variation in the Piedmont National Wildlife Preserve. Check it out here!
Jessy Patterson, co-director of the SCALE Lab, was recently published in Ecology and Evolution. This work focuses on better integrating terrestrial scavenging ecology into conservation decision making across the globe.
Wesley Rhinehart successfully defended his honors thesis focused on skeletal covariation in Didelphis virginiana (Virginia opossum). Congrats Wesley and good luck in grad school! Special thanks to Dr. Dansby-Sparks and the UNG Honors Program.
Our ongoing project investigating the late Pleistocene ecosystem of Clark Quarry in coastal Georgia was published in Quaternary Science Reviews. This work will provide a fantastic spatial and temporal framework for the next stages of this exciting project
Taylor Malasek successfully defended her thesis focused on Odocoileus virginianus (white-tailed deer) dietary ecology and life history. Great work and good luck in vet school! Special thanks to Dr. Dansby-Sparks and the UNG Honors Program.
Our work on Ophidiomycosis (snake fungal disease) throughout northeast Georgia has has been published in the Journal of Wildlife Diseases.
Jasmine's project on forest management practices affecting microhabitat abiotic variables was published in the Georgia Journal of Science. This is the result of her honor's thesis and FUSE grant work from 2017. Read more about the work here! We are so proud of her hard work!
Our paleoecology work along the Georgia coast was published in Quaternary Science Reviews. This project was funded by National Geographic and centers on understanding the ancient ecosystem just before human arrival in the region. Read more about the work here. Well done team!
Jessica Patterson and Aminda Everett were awarded a UNG FUSE grant to begin researching the effects of hemlock tree insecticide on amphibian development and feeding behaviors. This grant will allow for more targeted conservation strategies for endemic Appalachian amphibian populations. Read more about their work here.
SCALE lab student Cory Duckworth was awarded a prestigious NSF-GRFP to fund his future work in graduate school. Cory has been a fantastic student in the lab and a great mentor to other students. Read more about his work here. Cory will start grad school in the fall at the University of Pittsburgh. Keep up the great work!
Special thank you to UNG CURCA for funding our mini-grant projects. First, we are focusing on better understanding groundhog ecology in northeast Georgia. This work will specifically focus on groundhog spatial distribution as well as the other animals that inhabit their burrows. The second project is in collaboration with the Historic UNG Vickery House and the Lewis Rogers Institute for Environmental and Spatial Analysis. This work will focus on implementing precision agriculture technology at the Vickery House Gardens to create a model for efficient food production in local schools. Thank you CURCA!
Special thank you to the UNG College of Science and Mathematics for funding our project focusing on white-tailed deer dietary ecology in Georgia. This project will focus on understanding ontogenetic changes in diet as well as the manner by which white-tailed deer enamel records climatic conditions. This stable isotopic work will be important for deer management in Georgia, but also creating a relevant model for similar patterns in ancient mammals.
SCALE Alum Kayla Allen and David Patterson published their work focusing on ancient hominin diet in Nature Ecology and Evolution. Congrats!
Thank you to UNG News and the Dahlonega Nugget for spreading the word about our new app! IESA and SCALE Lab members worked together to develop and launch an app so citizen scientists can help document cases of Snake Fungal Disease.
Here is a link to the UNG news article: CLICK HERE.
We are excited to announce that we were awarded a National Geographic Society Exploration Grant to fund our continued paleontological excavations along the coast of Georgia. This portion of the project will focus on better understanding the environmental context of the region just prior to human arrival during the late Pleistocene.
Congratulations to Cory Duckworth for being accepted into the AMGEN summer research program! He was selected out of over 750 applicants and will be spending the summer at Stanford University working on honeybee gut microbiomes.
Here is more on Cory's fantastic achievement.
Over the past few months we have been extremely lucky to receive three internal UNG grants. Thank you to CURCA for the mini-grant towards SFD, the UNG Presidential office for a Presidential Innovative grant towards SFD and a Presidential Summer grant towards Brunswick fossil exploration. We are so grateful and can't WAIT to have a busy year of research, field work, and conferences!
Here are links to a few of the articles announcing the grants:
Congrats to Jasmine Williamson, Jessy Patterson and Michael Bender for their recent publications in Herpetological Review. The team found and published two new county records: Ambystoma maculatum (Spotted Salamander) and Pseudacris feriarum (Upland Chorus Frog). These findings will undoubtedly contribute to our understanding of the spatial distribution and future conservation of these two important amphibian species.
Thanks to Taylor Cooper and Alicia Gregory for the great news coverage of our recent excavations on the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, GA. Looking forward to many future trips!!
The SCALE Lab has received our first FUSE grant to continue the salamander project! Thank you CURCA for continuing to support our research!
Thank you Mark Udry for the great write up!
The SCALE Lab would like to UNG Academic Affairs for our Summer Incentive Presidential Award. This funding will be used to expand our understanding of late Pleistocene ecosystems and animal extinctions in coastal Georgia. We plan to undertake new excavations, create a coastal Georgia fossil database and complete new geochemical analyses. This project will be a collaboration between several departments and faculty at UNG, including Dr. Chris Seminack. We'll be taking our first trip to the fossil localities over the next few weeks and will continue through the summer and into next year. Stay tuned!
The SCALE Lab would like to congratulate Sharon Blackwell and Jasmine Williamson on their receipt of McNair Scholarships from UNG (https://ung.edu/news/articles/2017/10/ungs-mcnair-scholars-program-looking-for-a-few-good-scholars.php). They have both been working extremely hard and we look forward to the outcome of their very interesting research!
The SCALE Lab would like to thank the UNG Center for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities (CURCA) for supporting our project entitled: "Unlocking ancient carnivore ecology with contemporary feeding experiments". This funding will ensure that this project gets off to a great start and provides many different avenues for undergraduate research. You can read more about the other recipients of the CURCA mini-grants here.
This week we will having our first mini-workshop focusing on R (yes, there will be more!). Students, please download the R console and R studio prior coming to the workshop. Refer to the course document in the shared google drive for specific instructions. During the workshop, we will focus first on data (cleaning, organizing, etc.), getting data into the R console, basic statistical analyses and finally making plots. Although it will be frustrating at first, it will certainly be worth it in the end.
