The Blois lab is gearing up for the 2015 edition of Mammal March Madness!  We are so excited about this years competition.  Last year, we participated as a lab group.  This year, we’re ramping up the intra-lab competition and each filling out our own brackets.  Entries so far are pretty consistent: Jessica, Kaitlin, and Sarah are all predicting that Amphicyonidae will be the champ, but Chris predicts that Cath Palug will win it all. I’m throwing in a TBD prize for the lab winner(s).

The competition starts tonight. Err…I bet they’re already live-tweeting…I got delayed writing this post.

Totally random note: don’t forget the other geeky science event happening soon. This Saturday is Pi Day, so the Blois lab will have pie during our lab meeting on Thursday.

This Presidents’ day, the Blois lab decided to put the day off school to good use—to get a jump on some research! We will soon be starting a project sampling small mammals at the Vernal Pools reserve, located right behind UCM. This project will have two purposes: to give the reserve managers an idea of what species are present and in what abundances, and so our lab can conduct a live/dead analysis* on the species at the reserve. We are going to be live-trapping small mammals and collecting the dead ones we find nearby (in this place, dead small mammals are mostly found in the form of owl pellets, which we have been collecting from the reserve for some time). (more…)

…For winning the best early career poster award at the International Biogeography Society Meeting!

Jessica, Kaitlin, and Eric attended this year’s IBS meeting in Bayreuth, Germany to present posters on various research projects. Kaitlin’s poster, entitled  “Community level models outperform traditional species distribution models in no analog climates” won the award for best early career poster. Her co-authors were: Jessica Blois, Diego Nieto-Lugilde and Matt Fitzpatrick from the Appalachian Laboratory, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, and Jack Williams from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Unfortunately we cannot post a picture of the entire poster right now, but here is one of the figures comparing CLMs to SDMs.