B.C. Wildlife Federation’s Post

Today is the last day of Earth Month AND Citizen Science Month. 😭 (Don't worry, we will continue to love the Earth and citizen science year-round!) Learn about all the fun ways we involved our community in conservation and science education at Frost Science throughout the month of April in my latest blog post:

Don't forget, Erik Aarden will speak tomorrow at the #LMU Biozentrum! Looking forward to see you for a talk on #citizenscience #citizen #participation #science #ornithology #birds #birdlife #publicengagement #scicomm #biology

Check out this piece I wrote for The NAU Review about Ph.D. candidate Sara Gabrielson's research into invasive rodents in the forests of O'ahu, Hawaii! https://lnkd.in/gTCTgFUP

There is little research on Bartonella species and SARS-CoV-2 coinfections. This week we highlight a case report with references covering the current state of research. This and more in Galaxy Radar: https://lnkd.in/eVcMvPsH

For millennia, birds have been deified, celebrated in art and song, hunted, mass-produced for food and feathers, and for a great many, sent to extinction. Our newest exhibition, Chained to the Sky: The Science of Birds, Past & Future, tells the story of the human relationship with the avian world, the threats birds face today, and what we can do to protect them. LEARN MORE: https://bit.ly/3tKTtRx

Have you ever wondered how intelligent spiders are or if they are capable of more challenging behaviours, mainly seen with larger species? “There is this general idea that probably spiders are too small, that you need some kind of a critical mass of brain tissue to be able to perform complex behaviors,” says arachnologist and evolutionary biologist Dimitar Dimitrov of the University Museum of Bergen in Norway. “But I think spiders are one case where this general idea is challenged. Some small things are actually capable of doing very complex stuff.” Please read below: #petloss, #petlosssupport, #petlossgrief, #petlossgriefsupport, #APLB https://lnkd.in/gkSMmBr7.

💦Making a splash today (Sorry I couldn’t resist), we announced our collaboration with newly formed not for profit Citizens of the Sea. Harnessing the power of genomics and passionate citizen scientists, this work will deepen our understanding of ocean biodiversity and provide open-source data for marine researchers and conservation biologists .  The sailing rally in New Zealand today kicks off a large-scale trial, where – with the help of 25 dedicated sailors – Citizens of the Sea hopes to build the largest biophysical dataset ever assembled in the South-West Pacific region. ⛵️ One of the best ways to monitor health of the world’s oceans at scale is to collect and analyse environmental DNA (eDNA) data – the DNA found in traces of biological material that all species leave behind in the environment. If we collect hundreds of water samples across large geographic scales, we can isolate this eDNA in the laboratory, analyse it using next-generation sequencing (NGS), and identify which species are present and how that distribution shifts in space and time. This data will inform decision making about how we protect and manage our oceans in the face of a changing climate. 🐬 https://lnkd.in/gmWXewgu Xavier Pochon and Eric Swale – it is so exciting to see our discussions come to life! Cawthron Institute Illumina New Zealand Geographic Evgeny Glazov

A new study spearheaded by Professor Fang Li sheds light on the roles animals may have played in the evolutionary origin of COVID-19. Read about the findings at ➡️: bit.ly/4c9xHHm. #COVID19 | #COVIDresearch

Last week we uploaded >294k new records to the ALA! Including a new dataset from Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa containing >250k species records! 🌱 Check out the new dataset 🔗 http://spr.ly/6049euPvR #Data #Upload #DataPartner #Dataset #Species #Biodiversity

A new study, “Bellwethers of change”, tracks humpback whale populations in the North Pacific Ocean for the past 20 years with the largest individual identification dataset ever compiled for a whale species. After a period of recovery following the end of commercial whaling in 1976, numbers peaked in 2012 then declined by 20% by 2021, likely due to the impact of a severe marine heatwave from 2014 to 2016, which reduced food availability for humpback whales. This collaborative study highlights the humpback whale as an indicator species for the health of the North Pacific ecosystem in a changing climate. This is the result of the hard work of leading scientist Ted Cheeseman and a collaboration with more than 70 scientists doing whale research in the North Pacific ! Check out the full paper here: https://lnkd.in/enn_BuYt