Huge thanks to UCSC’s Gage Dayton & Kelly Zilliacus, who led the postfire monitoring efforts across the UCNRS & collected baseline data that made this work possible, now featured in our new @jappliedecology.bsky.social paper!

IMO, every California ecologist should think about fire or at least spend some time with the fire ecology lit (you could teach a whole ecology class based on van Mantgem et al 2015)

That experience changed how I think about long-term trends & what it means to do ecology in systems shaped by frequent disturbances.

Over the next few years, I watched these landscapes regain color, sound - and eventually, ticks.

I didn’t plan to study fire. But when I showed up to my field sites in Jan 2020, some of the state’s largest fire complexes had burned through many of them.

Thanks, I appreciate the s/o!

however we found this effect to be Culex species dependent, with urban mosquitoes less impacted by environmental fluctuation - possibly bc they’re supplemented by urban H20 sources even during dry years

We found that an increase in landscape wetness increases mos abundance, but decreases WNV infection rates. This has been shown in previous studies but now we put it in a quasi causal framework (ie econometric models)

We looked at 3.6 M mosquitoes from >500K trap nights collected by Kern Co Vector Control & paired it with environmental variables including drought metrics

stay tuned for more work in this climate-driven phenology-pathogen space!

There are caveats, but we found an intriguing signal: in cooler CA sites, nymphs may emerge noticeably earlier than larvae. This trend may explain why tick infection rates are higher in these regions compared to warmer sites, where life stages emerge more synchronously.

This builds on Sambado 2024, which examined within-season (jan-june 2021), & expands to explore across-season (spring 2013-2023) dynamics in collab w lizard researchers 🦎

big thanks to the NCEP team for their editorial support!

These materials are designed for undergrads/techs who are new to R - and who want a conservation-centered perspective, not just typical coding tutorials 🌿📊

I’ll highlight some of my work on droughts, wildfire & latitudinal gradients and their impact on 🦟 & 🕷️(ticks)

during my seminar I will be discussing ideas I think are professionally interesting as a disease ecologist & personally relevant as a Californian

Thanks Colin! At the very least bats are reducing nuisance pests, which is a plus 🦇

Congrats on all of the exciting pubs this week!

#Ecology