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I have six main ongoing research projects and several smaller projects:

  • Ecology, conservation, and sex determination of diamondback terrapins

  • Ecology and conservation of wood turtles in northern NJ

  • The effects of tick host species diversity on Lyme Disease risk

  • Box turtle resources use and its life history implications

  • The effects that the coyotes making their way to Long Island will have on current vertebrate communities

  • Novel ways of estimating the number of vertebrates in an area; this includes using parasite densities to estimate local terrapin numbers, and using camera traps to count mammals


So far this work has focused on Jamaica Bay including both National Park and JFK airport. When we started, over 2000 nests/year were laid on the island of Ruler's Bar, that has dropped to fewer than 1000/year now.  Also, nest mortality is over 90% since raccoons were introduced. This project involves most of my graduate students, undergraduate students, and volunteers. Most of the project has been a long-term mark/recapture effort to detect population trends, but we have branched off in many directions.  Click here for the web site that discusses this project in much greater detail, including instructions for volunteers. 

 

 

We began a long term research program investigating the ecology and conservation of diamondback  terrapins at Gateway National Recreational Area in 1998 

Since 1996 I have been studying the demography and reproduction of both wild and captive wood turtles

My goal is two fold: to gain information useful to the conservation of this species, and to test some of the most important theories of genetic and environmental sex determination. These are ideal species for this kind of work because wood turtles have genotypic sex determination (GSD), and some of their close relatives have temperature sex determination (TSD).

These are difficult animals to study, which is why little detailed information is known about their behavior in the wild. Fortunately, lots of other people are working on them now too and some great stuff is coming out. My field site has lots of wood turtles, and I've been radio tracking them and focusing on their nesting ecology. I've been struck by their interesting interactions with beaver.

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