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Alejandra Echeverri, PhD

@ornithoale.bsky.social

190 followers 220 following 28 posts

#CienciaCriolla 🇨🇴 | Assistant Prof at UC Berkeley | NatGeo Young Explorer| CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar 2024-2026| PI of the Echeverri Lab: Conserving Wildlife and Human Cultures She/Ella #LatinasSTEM

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Alejandra Echeverri, PhD @ornithoale.bsky.social · Jan 10

New year, new platform! Hoping to rebuild my network… 👋

I miss the old 🐦‍⬛ days, but I’m excited to build back my network better and use this platform to share news about the Echeverri Lab at UC Berkeley! We are growing and I can’t wait to introduce the new members!

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Harman Jaggi @harmanjaggi.bsky.social · Sep 5

Had a great interaction with Sahana Ghosh from Nature India about our black pea research. Here's her excellent story on our paper:
www.nature.com/articles/d44...
@nature.com
@ornithoale.bsky.social
@stanforddoerr.bsky.social

An ancient pea holds lessons for a warming Himalaya

Nurtured for millennia in the Trans-Himalaya, the hardy black pea outperforms cash crops in resilience and nutrition — and could reshape how science values farmers’ knowledge and forgotten foods.

www.nature.com

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · Sep 4

the worst part of every manuscript for an ornithologist,

yes, worse than tough reviewers
worse even than outright rejection

when they typeset the paper and all the species names are lower case

a man in a suit is crying in the rain .

ALT: a man in a suit is crying in the rain .

media.tenor.com

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Harman Jaggi @harmanjaggi.bsky.social · Aug 20

Happy to share our research was featured in Stanford reports. @stanforddoerr.bsky.social @ornithoale.bsky.social
news.stanford.edu/stories/2025...

The ecological promise of the Himalayan black pea

Stanford researchers discovered a nearly forgotten variety of black peas from the northwest Himalayas that excels in climate resilience and nutrition.

news.stanford.edu

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Harman Jaggi @harmanjaggi.bsky.social · Aug 19

Happy to share our research on traditional farming landscapes in northwest Himalaya is out in Science Advances! Thanks to my advisor Tulja & all the wonderful collaborators- Ale @ornithoale.bsky.social, Katie @kasolari.bsky.social, Akshata, Kullu, Rinchen, Lamaji. 1/7 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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Alejandra Echeverri, PhD @ornithoale.bsky.social · Aug 19

Check out our newest study published in Science Advances last Friday ❤️

Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability @stanforddoerr.bsky.social · Aug 19

With support from the Sustainability Accelerator at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, researchers have shown that, compared to green peas, a variety of black peas with a 3,000-year legacy in the Trans-Himalayas is more nutritious and climate resilient.

Study reveals benefits of traditional Himalayan crops

Stanford researchers discovered that a nearly forgotten variety of black peas from the northwest Himalayas in India is genetically distinct from other peas and outperforms them.

stanford.io

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Jorge Ramos, PhD @jorgerh2o.bsky.social · Aug 8

See you at #ESA2025 next week!Find me at the ESA SEEDS events, Wed, 10:30 AM Panel on Careers at a Research Station with OBFS friends; and Thu, 5 PM Poster LB 13-177 on Wildfire resilience initiatives at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve ('Ootchamin 'Ooyakma)!

Wednesday, August 13, 2025, 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM EDT
Preparing for a Career at a Research Station
Career Central Room 1 (Exhibit Hall)

Presentations
LB 13-177 - Wildfire resilience initiatives at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve ('Ootchamin 'Ooyakma) with outcomes in collaboration, research, education and stewardship.
Thursday, August 14, 2025, 5:00 PM – 6:30 PM EDT
Presenting Author - Jorge Ramos

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Katherine Xue @ksxue.bsky.social · Jul 17

The Xue lab at UC Irvine is looking for a staff scientist to support our work investigating how microbes interact and evolve in the gut microbiome! Open to a wide range of previous experience levels, see ad for more.
recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09601

Junior, Assistant, or Associate Specialist – Xue Lab

University of California, Irvine is hiring. Apply now!

recruit.ap.uci.edu

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D. Allan Drummond @dadrummond.art · Jul 7

Of course the main purpose of a yard is to attract bugs, and the best way to attract bugs is with native plants, so that’s mostly what we do. Here’s a sampling—descriptions in alt text. 🐝🦋🐛🐜🪰🪲🐞 (Remaining grass lets us play games and lets doggies chase balls, but is slowly going to clover)

A nine panel overview of native insects on native plants from our yard. Starting in the upper left, Agapostemon (a native bee) on echinacea, a young grasshopper, a Mydas fly swamp milkweed, a woolcarder bee with just its butt showing out of an obedient plant flower, two mating milkweed bugs (strikingly yellow and red) on milkweed, a hoverfly on a cherry blossom, another hoverfly on queen of the prairie flowerbuds, a monarch butterfly on blazing star, and a great black wasp on mountain mint.

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Kaitlyn Gaynor @kaitlyngaynor.bsky.social · Jun 17

Have you ever cited or come across a mention of the 'human shield hypothesis' and wondered: what is the evidence for this hypothesis, and what is the quality of that evidence? Wonder no more!
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The Human Shield Hypothesis: Does Predator Avoidance of Humans Create Refuges for Prey?

The human shield hypothesis posits that predators avoid areas of human disturbance due to perceived risk from humans, and prey therefore seeks refuge in these areas of perceived safety. Our systemati....

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Kelley Langhans (she/her) @kelleylanghans.bsky.social · May 14

It was a pleasure to work with my amazing interdisciplinary team of coauthors: @ornithoale.bsky.social, Maya Xu, @flamingmuffinz.bsky.social, Mei Li Palmeri, Meggie Callahan, Nicole Ardoin, and Gretchen Daily

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Kelley Langhans (she/her) @kelleylanghans.bsky.social · May 14

This underscores the importance of urban community gardens - not only do they provide habitat for biodiversity and opportunities to access nature, but also many other benefits: social connections, education, and food sovereignty. Let’s work to protect and advocate for urban community gardens!

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Kelley Langhans (she/her) @kelleylanghans.bsky.social · May 14

Regardless, these results are exciting - they suggest that community gardens have the potential to provide access to nature across an income gradient! People in both high and low income neighborhoods in San Francisco can have positive interactions with birds in gardens.

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Kelley Langhans (she/her) @kelleylanghans.bsky.social · May 14

Why might this be? It could be because birds are highly mobile organisms, the nature of San Francisco (compact, lots of greenspace, heterogenous), regional effects (luxury effect is stronger in tropical and arid environments), or community gardens themselves.

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Kelley Langhans (she/her) @kelleylanghans.bsky.social · May 14

For example, we expected lower income neighborhoods to have less canopy cover and therefore less avian species richness, but instead found all three of these variables were unrelated!

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Kelley Langhans (she/her) @kelleylanghans.bsky.social · May 14

Instead, we found that avian species richness and abundance were predicted by local and landscape-scale environmental factors, very few of which were correlated with income.

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Kelley Langhans (she/her) @kelleylanghans.bsky.social · May 14

Surprisingly, given past studies on the luxury effect that show higher biodiversity in higher income neighborhoods, we found no relationships between any of these metrics and garden income!

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Kelley Langhans (she/her) @kelleylanghans.bsky.social · May 14

For each garden, we compared three bird metrics with garden income: species richness, abundance, and a species access metric, a metric for our 10 focal species that was higher where there were more individuals from species people noticed and cared about.

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Kelley Langhans (she/her) @kelleylanghans.bsky.social · May 14

We dug into why attitudes differed. While less-popular species had mostly aesthetic disservices, popular species had both ecological and aesthetic services. This suggests that providing education about species’ ecological roles could be an important conservation tool!

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Kelley Langhans (she/her) @kelleylanghans.bsky.social · May 14

However, we also wanted to understand how much gardeners noticed each species. When we weighted sentiment scores by recognition, the scores of less-charismatic species like the Black Phoebe dropped.

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Kelley Langhans (she/her) @kelleylanghans.bsky.social · May 14

Using these results, we were able to assign each species a “sentiment score” and rank them in terms of positive sentiment. Most species had more positive than negative words associated with them, while corvids were the exception.

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Kelley Langhans (she/her) @kelleylanghans.bsky.social · May 14

For each species, we performed a sentiment analysis, classifying words into positive, negative and neutral. While species like the Anna’s Hummingbird had primarily positive associations, others like the American Crow, were more controversial.

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Kelley Langhans (she/her) @kelleylanghans.bsky.social · May 14

We also examined gardener attitudes towards 10 common garden species, chosen to capture a range of traits, through a word association task.

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Kelley Langhans (she/her) @kelleylanghans.bsky.social · May 14

Through our surveys, we learned that gardeners felt positively about birds overall, showing high agreement with a number of positive statements about birds in the garden!

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Kelley Langhans (she/her) @kelleylanghans.bsky.social · May 14

We worked in 20 community gardens across an income gradient in San Francisco, CA, surveying gardeners, performing avian point counts, and survey vegetation.

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Kelley Langhans (she/her) @kelleylanghans.bsky.social · May 14

We studied a specific type of access to nature, human/bird interactions, through an interdisciplinary lens. We wanted to understand how people felt about birds overall as well as specific species, and where people came into contact with those species as well as diverse bird communities.

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