PhD Defense – Grace Wong, ‘Conservation Status of large mammals on the Osa Penisula, Costa Rica’ Room 312A

To: ECO Faculty and Graduate Students From: Todd Fuller, Professor Subject: Final Doctoral Examination for Grace Wong The Final Doctoral Oral Examination for Grace Wong, a Ph.D. Candidate in Wildlife and Fisheries Conservation, is scheduled to be held on Friday, 8 November 2013 at 9:30a.m. in Room 312A, Holdsworth NRC. Her committee members are Todd Fuller (Chair), Paul Sievert, and Brooke Thomas (Anthropology). The title of her dissertation is: Conservation status of large mammals on the Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica. Graduate courses that Grace has taken at Universidad Nacional in Costa Rica and here at UMass are as follows: M.S. Wildlife Management - Universidad Nacional Rural Sociology Public Administration of Natural Resources Animal Behavior Ecology of Vertebrate Populations Biometry Wildlife Management Habitat Evaluation Wildlife Seminar Wildlife Management Techniques Thesis Seminar Wildlife Seminar I Wildlife Seminar II Wildlife Management II Environmental Education Biological Conservation Multi-disciplinary Research Ph.D. Wildlife and Fisheries Conservation - University of Massachusetts W&FCON 899 Ph.D. Dissertation PUB HL 540 Introduction to Biostatistics W&FCON 564 Forest Wildlife Ecol. & Mgt. W&FCON 691R Seminar - Research Methods BIOL 591A Primate Behavior (audit) W&FCON 692J Seminar Experimental Design W&FCON 697D Human Dimensions & Recreation Resource Mgt W&FCON...
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Graduate Program Meeting- Room 312A

Our next graduate program meeting will be held this coming Monday, November  4 at 5:00 pm in Holdsworth 312A. The presentation this month will be a group presentation by several students on fixed array telemetry systems, including acoustic telemetry and nanotags, that a number of our students/faculty are using in their research. This will be an opportunity to learn a little about these systems and the unique challenges they offer for deployment and data analysis, and here from several of our students about how they intend to use this technology in their research. Pam Loring will lead the student team in this presentation, but we will hear very briefly from several students about their applications, who are at all stages of development from just thinking about how to use it to having a system in place and collecting data....
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Students research trees planted after tornado damage

  courtesy:  http://www.umass.edu/gateway/feature/tree-grows-springfield A Tree Grows in Springfield   In the aftermath of a tornado that ripped through Springfield, Mass., on June 1, 2011, one third of the trees in the areas hardest hit had to be removed. Now, a team of UMass researchers and students is aiding the “ReGreen Springfield” plan to replant 3,830 trees, studying each newly planted tree to determine how well it is growing and which ones survive best in urban conditions. “To gain the most benefits out of a reforestation, it is critical to know how quickly the tree establishes itself and whether it will survive,” says Brian Kane ’97G, ’02PhD, arboriculture professor in the Department of Environmental Conservation. After the study is completed in a few years it will provide evidence of which species best thrive. “The study has immediate value for practitioners. They’ll know what’s going to work in a given set of growing conditions and the study will help other communities that suffer damage from extreme weather...
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Regional Planning Faculty Receive $250K NSF Grant for ‘City Science’ Exhibit at Worcester’s EcoTarium

Courtesy of In the Loop October 23, 2013 A team of researchers led by Robert L. Ryan, landscape architecture and regional planning, has been awarded a $250,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to integrate the science of urban systems into the new City Science exhibit at the EcoTarium museum in Worcester. The project, “From the Lab to the Neighborhood: An Interactive Living Exhibit for Advancing STEM Engagement with Urban Systems in Science Museums,” will develop prototype exhibits that explore the complex interconnections between human and natural systems, using the city as a laboratory for informal learning. The collaboration with exhibit designers and science educators at the EcoTarium, the second largest science museum in Massachusetts with over 130,000 visitors per year, is funded as a pilot grant from the NSF’s Advancing Informal STEM Learning program. “From the Lab to the Neighborhood” builds upon the team’s existing urban ecology research led by Paige Warren, environmental conservation department, which has explored the implications of land use...
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Dr. Charles Schweik featured on MIT Press website in honor of Open Access week

Provided by: http://mitpress.mit.edu/blog/open-access-week Posted by: Dave Ryman For Open Access Week, we have a post from Charles Schweik, author of Internet Success: A Study of Open-Source Software Commons. In 2006, my colleague Robert English and I started the research that is reported in our book Internet Success: A Study of Open Source Software Commons (MIT Press, 2012). We wanted to systematically study how computer programmers—the people who have had the most experience working together under an open access model—actually collaborate. Using a database of more than 170,000 open source software projects, we researched this question both quantitatively and qualitatively. We reported findings related to team size, project leadership, developer motivations, project governance, and implications for moving toward a more general theory of Internet-based collective action. In honor of Open Access week, we’ll report one finding that has real relevance to this year’s theme: “Redefining Impact.” In our research, we discovered that the majority of successful open source software projects—the ones that produced useful software...
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