The work happens while the blog sleeps.

Greetings!  Sadly, I have let this blog lapse the past couple years.  But that doesn’t mean I have forsaken writing, or bees.  Since I last posted here I have spent a semester abroad in Rehovot, Israel working on bee foraging experiments with Dr. Yael Mandelik, I have completed and defended my Master’s degree with the USDA-ARS “Logan Bee Lab” at Utah State University, and I have begun pursuing a PhD in Interdisciplinary Ecology at the University of Florida School of Natural Resources and the Environment.  I will be continuing to think about bee foraging, community ecology, decline, and coexistence among the rich fauna at Pinnacles National Park for my dissertation, so stay tuned!

This past month I have been very busy sharing my research at both the Gordon Research Conference on “Unifying Ecology Across Scales” in Biddeford, Maine and at the Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  Yesterday I gave an invited talk at the ESA meeting in a research session organized by iDigBio called “Leveraging the Power of Biodiversity Specimen Data for Ecological Research.” In our talk titled “Using digital Natural History Collection specimens to investigate the future of bee conservation,” I discussed opportunities and challenges associated with building and using large specimens data sets and discussed the efforts of myself and colleagues Jon Koch and Amber Tripodi to use this type of data on native bees to approach questions about definitive bee declines over large spatial, temporal, and community-wide scales. I am very excited about this line of research, and about sharing the ongoing journey with you. Supposedly the video of my talk will soon be online, and I will make sure to share it here when it is! For now, take a look at the guest blog post I wrote for iDigBio’s August Research Spotlight and also some of the great feedback and responses I received from many interesting people via Twitter (below) after the talk!

https://www.idigbio.org/content/research-spotlight-august-2016

Update: Here is the link to my talk at ESA, which was also posted by Kevin Love in the comments below (thanks!).

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