I-WONDER

Major: Biology

I-Wonder Question: I wonder why Wild Basin looks the way it does? I wonder what is the relationship between microbial communities in soil and the abiotic soil characteristics?

Current Research:  Microbial communities provide many critical ecosystem functions to soils, including organic matter decomposition and nutrient cycling. In continuation of a 2 year project investigating the relationship between soil characteristics and the microbial communities at Wild Basin, I am describing the moisture, organic matter content, and the pH of soils at different areas in the wilderness preserve. Microbial communities are being described by their functional diversity on a range of carbon sources, essentially how much the microbes eat different types of food.

With the award of the Hook Fellowship I am going even further in describing soil characteristics and microbial community composition. Concerning soil, I am identifying the ratio of carbon to nitrogen, this will help in understanding decomposition rates. For microorganisms, I am analyzing the differences in the sequences of ribosomal 16s RNA. The 16srRNA sequence is used because it is highly conserved, so it does not change much over time, so it is an efficient way of differentiating microorganisms from each other without having to culture them all.

Future Plans: I am going for a masters and eventual PhD in microbiology with the goal of conducting microbial ecology research. Currently, I am preparing for the GRE and researching labs conduction research that interest me. As for the near future, I am presenting my data at the 2017 Environmental Society of America conference in Portland, OR.

Austin recently joined the world’s largest urban wildlife monitoring initiative to help save the country’s urban wildlife.  As one of nine cities across the U.S. currently participating in the Urban Wildlife Information Network (UWIN), Austin recently launched a cross-city monitoring effort to help people and animals thrive together by gathering and analyzing data on urban biodiversity.  Established in 2010 by the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, UWIN ultimately seeks to discover and apply solutions to existing or potential human-wildlife conflicts and inform city planning and wildlife management efforts.  

In Austin, the biodiversity monitoring efforts are led by the Wild Basin Creative Research Center at St. Edward’s University, in collaboration with partners at the City of Austin, Travis County, Texas Parks & Wildlife, and Texas A&M. Four times a year, biologists install wildlife cameras in green spaces across Austin, from highly-developed downtown parks to less-developed preserves outside of the city.  The cameras are motion-triggered and snap up digital images as wildlife cross in view of a camera.  Beginning in Summer 2017, citizen scientists can help researchers tag photos for data analysis by clicking through photos online and identifying animal species captured on camera.  

Quotes from UWIN Partners:

“For the first time, we’re trying to understand what urban animals all around the country have in common.  We know forests in the Pacific Northwest and forests in New England are different, but how is Austin different from Denver? Once we know what all these cities have in common, and what factors influence their local species, we can use that knowledge to start designing wildlife-friendly cities around the world,” said Seth Magle, Ph.D., Lincoln Park Zoo Urban Wildlife Institute (UWI) Director.

“Austin is a city that prides itself on its wildlife-friendliness, abundant green spaces, and access to nature. We're thrilled to partner with UWIN on this project to examine urban wildlife distributions and better understand the factors that make a city truly wildlife-friendly," said Amy Belaire, Ph.D., Research Director at Wild Basin Creative Research Center, St. Edward's University.

“We are excited for this unprecedented research opportunity, and as partners in the Fort Collins, Colo.-area, we look forward to the myriad research discoveries this initiative will bring,” said Christopher J. Schell, NSF Postdoctoral Fellow, Colorado State University.  

Using Kaleidoscope Software to Analyze Bioacoustic Recordings By Olivia Leos

If I could compare using the Wildlife Acoustics program Kaleidoscope to anything, it would be sort of like learning to use a computer for the first time. It is challenging at first, with different buttons, colors, and gadgets. I had to constantly refer back to the instructions until suddenly it clicked!

The journey to learning Kaleidoscope was not exactly a walk in the park, although at times (most of the time) it was quite fun! First, as we’ve already shared on this blog, we had to learn to identify bird by their songs. It was a matter of practicing every day and simply acknowledging the bird songs that we heard on a daily basis. Once you become conscious of all the types of songs, it becomes easier to begin to identify the bird. My routine to become adept at identifying birds was to take a walk through nature (often with my smartphone and a variety of handy bird ID apps) and test myself to see if I could listen to a bird and tell what it was by only hearing the song. In the drop of a hat, I was able to identify birds by just their songs.

Next, set up the acoustic monitoring system! This is when you put your explorer hat on and head out into the field. We set up four acoustic monitoring units (Wildlife Acoustics Song Meter SM4 Acoustic Recorders) along a transect line in Wild Basin that went from high urbanization to low urbanization. We placed the units in similar habitat types, away from anthropogenic activity along the trails, and at similar heights. We especially tried to put them in areas where the golden-cheeked warbler (an endangered songbird species) might reside. We also set up the schedules on the units to record for an hour in the early morning and an hour at night. At the end of each week, we would go into the field to retrieve the memory card from each unit and replace it with a new one. We took the full memory cards back to the lab because they were ready to be analyzed using the Kaleidoscope sound analysis program.

The Kaleidoscope program itself works by grouping the similar bird songs into clusters where we would then identify them. Sometimes up to thirty different songs belonged to the same cluster. We would identify the clusters as Northern Cardinal, Blue Jay, Carolina Wren, etc. Later, the program can use these identified clusters to help identify new recordings that come in. Over the long term, this data could potentially tell us which birds reside where, the environment that certain types of birds prefer, and the role urbanization plays in affecting bird communities.

Major: Environmental science with an emphasis in biology.

Future Plans: I would like to focus on preservation and conservation. I enjoy working in the field and making a difference where I work. I plan to attend graduate school after a semester or two of time to figure out the perfect program for me. To narrow my interests, I hope to begin work in my field after traveling abroad this summer.  

Current Internship: Working on various projects around Wild Basin Nature Preserve. This semester I have focused on water quality testing, invasive species removal, trail maintenance, game camera photo processing, and implementation of fire wise procedures to protect the main building on the preserve.  Working in the field accounts for a good portion of my internship - I enjoy field work much more than office work.

Other Internship Experience: Outside of Wild Basin, I have interned for clean water action at their main building near UT campus. This internship was all based in their office and was brief. The internship at Wild Basin was my first long term internship and I enjoyed learning all I could about the preserve.

Quote: “The movers and shakers on our planet, aren’t the billionaires and generals, they are the incredible numbers of people around the world filled with love for neighbor and for the earth who are resisting, remaking, restoring, renewing and revitalizing” – Bill McKibben

Major: Global Studies with an emphasis in Global Public Health and regional focus on Latin America, minor in Environmental Science & Policy

Future Plans: 

Next fall Nick will be joining Saint Louis University’s School of Public Health & Social Justice for their two-year Master of Public Health Program. He will be completing a combination of foundational courses combined with both Environmental Health and Global Public Health. Nick hopes to do field research on the intersection between Latin American developing countries and anthropogenic climate change as it relates to infectious diseases and community welfare. It is his goal to eventually work at a domestic or international NGO that serves these very communities.

Current Internship: 

Over the past two years, Nick has been an intern here at Wild Basin. While his official title is an Environmental Management Intern, he has contributed to many different ongoing projects including but not limited to wildlife cameras, invasive species management, volunteer coordination, and graduate research projects.

Other internships/experience:

 In the past four years of his undergraduate experience, Nick has enjoyed internships and jobs in many different sectors of the greater environmental community. His environmental experience started as a Freshman as an environmental advocacy intern for Environment Texas, successfully collecting hundreds of signatures in support of the Clean Power Plan. Soon after, Nick worked with American YouthWorks/Texas Conservation Corps and led groups of at-risk youth in conservation projects throughout the greater Central Texas Area. He continued with his academic experience by completing a semester abroad at James Cook University in Australia, which was recently ranked as the world’s #1 Marine Biology and #2 Conservation Biology Program. In the May previous to his study abroad, Nick travelled with fifteen other students to Costa Rica as part of St. Edward’s Eco-Leadership program.

Capstone Research

During his final semester of undergraduate semester, Nick is researching the stakeholders and potential consequences of a proposed pipeline in the Oriente region of Ecuador. The research focuses on the potential impact to the country’s economy and the Indigenous people of the Ecuadorean Amazon. He will complete his research, field experience, and service learning while in Ecuador at the end of May under the direction and guidance of Santiago Toledo, PhD, and Tricia D. Shepherd, Ph.D.

 Acknowledgements

Over the past month, we have been working on calibrating, setting up, and recording data for the wildlife acoustics project at Wild Basin. This project has been a lot of fun and very interesting since day one, when we first learned about the purpose of the project. The Wildlife Acoustics SM4 units are set up to record sounds in the morning and at night in hopes that we get a cool variety of bird songs/calls and frog calls. They record for one hour at sunrise to capture the “dawn chorus” of all the birds singing, and another hour after dark when frogs and toads are most likely to be vocalizing.

Olivia and I have continued practicing and quizzing ourselves on bird songs and calls so that when we listen to the recordings, we are better able to identify the bird.

Quote: "Future generations may well have occasions to ask themselves 'What were our parents thinking? Why didn't they wake up when they had the chance?' We have to hear that question from them, now"  - Al Gore

Major: Environmental Science and Policy with an emphasis in environmental science

Future Goals: I would like to possibly go into wildlife and conservation research. I also like environmental law and I’m thinking about pursuing a career in politics because that is where and how things change.

Current Internship: As an intern I’m working on monitoring animal behavior by working with wildlife acoustics and wildlife camera monitoring systems. I’m also interested in water quality data analysis and plants.

Other internships/experience: I have worked for a nonprofit and governmental internship with El Paso Office of Sustainability, the Texas Department of Agriculture, and the Green Corn Project, which searches for sustainable gardening. I also participated in St. Edward’s EcoLead--“shoutout to Dr. Wasserman!”

Learning bird songs at Wild Basin

By Olivia Leos and Gabriela Macias

Our quest for bird knowledge continues!  In the past few weeks, we have been listening to and practicing identifying different birds’ songs.  This is an important skill for us to learn so that we can help identify the birds on our bioacoustic recordings this spring.  There’s a really cool online tool that was developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology called “All About Bird Song,” and we’ve used it to learn more about birds and their songs and practice identifying songs of different species. There was a section in the course named “Bird Song Hero”- yes, you read that right. Surprisingly we have been doing pretty well!

It is fascinating to see the progress that we have made, because we are already able to identify some birds’ songs with just a few weeks of practice. One thing that we found really interesting (which may be obvious, but we just never really put much thought into it) is that birds practice their songs in order to get the sound just right. Songbirds listen to “tutors” so they can master their perfect song.

We find that listening to these different birds songs and calls has given us a whole new appreciation and awareness for a part of nature that we never paid much attention to before. As Gabby said, “Birds aren’t really just background noise to me that I tune out anymore. Pretty much everywhere I go now, I’ll pause to listen and try to figure out which birds are singing. In fact, Olivia and I are always texting each other saying how we’re both always trying to ID birds now.”

ADVENTURES IN SOUND: FIELD-TESTING THE BIOACOUSTIC RECORDERS AND LEARNING ABOUT SPECTROGRAMS

After last week’s calibration in the anechoic chamber, this week we tested the SM4 acoustic recorders in the field. We took four of the recorders and played a series of cardinal sounds at varying distances.

Before we started the testing, the first thing we did was use an iPhone app to determine the decibel level of three different locations that were varying distances from Highway 360, at the western boundary of Wild Basin. This helped us determine the baseline level of anthropogenic (man-made) noise before getting started. Once an average decibel level was recorded, we played the cardinal sounds at 10m, 30m, and 50m away from the SongMeter SM4 recorders.

We then took the SD cards and the units back to the computer lab in the Wild Basin Creative Research Center and looked at the recordings on the Wildlife Acoustic analysis software, Kaleidoscope. This software helps you quickly convert files, sort and categorize data by species, and review a visualization of the sound recordings. It was interesting to look at the spectrograms on the computer and see the variations in sound intensity over distance. The spectrogram shows you the intensity of sounds at various frequencies over time.  It was also really interesting to compare the spectrograms for the “pink noise” that we recorded in the anechoic chamber to the spectrograms of a bird song.  Pink noise covers all the sound frequencies at once, so it shows up as a big block on the spectrogram.  On the other hand, a bird song has a distinctive pattern that moves across a range of frequencies in a short span of time.

There was some user error with the recorder settings that we will sort out and hope to eliminate next time in the field. It was fun to finally get to test the equipment in the field and visualize what the recordings look like on the computer. There is going to be a learning curve with using these new techniques, equipment, and software, but it’s really helpful to test things out in the field prior to formal data collection. Next step we are deploying the units in early March to start gathering data.

Wild Basin is 227 acres of habitat, but it looks different depending on where you are in the preserve -- some sections are dominated by Ashe junipers, whereas other parts have a mix of other tree species like oaks and elms. Dr. Bilinski's Ecology Lab is doing research at Wild Basin this semester to figure out how ecosystem processes vary in parts of Wild Basin that contain different plant species. During their time at Wild Basin, they are learning different field ecology techniques and collecting data on Wild Basin's plants and soils. They are working in groups to design research projects, collect data in the field, and conduct different analyses to answer their research questions. They'll be presenting their findings in a panel discussion at the end of the semester -- stay tuned to learn what they find out! #EcologyLab #SEU

Simon and Garfunkel once sang about the sounds of silence but few actually get to experience complete and utter silence. University of Texas in Austin is home to one of the rare anechoic chambers -- a room completely lined with wedge-shaped sound absorbers that take in any vibrations in the air and dampen it. It effectively achieves almost total silence and it is so quiet in the room that after a short period of time you begin to hear your own heart beat. Apparently the quietest one ever built is housed in Washington by Microsoft’s audio lab and it is so quiet that the maximum amount of time anyone has been able to stay inside is approximately 45 minutes. This is because human beings orient themselves through the sounds we hear, so when that is completely eliminated it’s almost impossible to get your bearings.

These chambers are commonly used to conduct experiments such as testing the response of loudspeakers, microphones, and even motorcycles if the chamber is big enough. In our case, we used UT’s anechoic chamber to calibrate four Wildlife Acoustic SM4 SongMeter recorders that will be used in Wild Basin WIlderness Preserve to capture sound and monitor the sounds of wildlife.  The long-term goal of the study is to monitor changes in bird and anuran communities as the surrounding landscape becomes increasingly urbanized.

In order to calibrate each recorder, we set up a loudspeaker directly 1 meter (3.28 ft) in front of each SM4 SongMeter device and played a series of pre-recorded “pink noise” sound tracks. Each recording was played for three 30-second intervals, and the process was repeated for both the Left and Right microphones. “Pink noise” is the desired noise to use when calibrating sound instruments because it mathematically corresponds to how the human ear is designed to hear sound (i.e., in octave bands). Pink noise contains equal energy per octave, so when you look at the recordings on a typical spectrogram display (a plot of sound frequency over time), you will see the sound represented as a box because all sound frequencies occur simultaneously. These calibrations are important to do prior to collecting data in the field to ensure that all recorders are collecting and labeling sounds in the same way.

Getting to experience an anechoic chamber was very cool -- and pro tip: eat before entering one as your stomach growls become very loud and evident in the chamber!

Blog by  Anne-Marie Walker, Wild Basin Intern

WONDERING the role a drone played in efforts to estimate the deer population at Wild Basin?

WONDERING how Wild Basin looks from above through  infrared lens?

Wondering how a drone could help estimate the density of white-tailed deer at Wild Basin?