Salamander Chronicles

Like the amphibians, I am reemerging after a long cold winter. Since my last post, which was many months ago, not much has happened in my research world besides applying for numerous grants to maintain sufficient funding to keep me moving this field season. I was also lucky enough to be on the Ohio University Graduate College Fellowship this year which allowed me the time to apply to more grants, better prepare for field work, and most importantly start my field season earlier. Many of my low elevation sites become much to warm for salamanders later in the year so an early start will help me fill in many of my sampling gaps. Also now that the field season is starting up, I am really hoping to keep updates coming much more frequently focusing on natural history observations during this spring and summer.

The 2014 field season kicks off Friday, March 21st when I head to northern Georgia. I will be working my way up to Virginia during this first trip before returning to Athens in early April. I will make a couple more trips down south before starting the bulk of my field work on May 9th. Below is my tentative schedule which I will try to keep updated. If anyone wants to come see come salamanders let me know!

I will also be attending the 2014 Plethodontid Meeting in Tulsa, Oklahoma May 18th-20th. This meeting only occurs once every 5-10 years so I am really excited to get to participate in this event. Eighty talks/posters on plethodontid salamanders, how can you not be excited!?

For now, I will continue preparing for a long spring and summer of field work, be on the look out for a salamander filled post next week!

Well, I had some WordPress issues and I lost all my previous blog posts.  Luckily, I had a cached version and I re-posted all of them and I will keep a better record of my posts in case this happens in the future.

First a quick update of all the boring stuff from the last few months.  The fall semester was spent primarily applying for grants.  In total I submitted around $60,000 worth of grant applications.  I have already received $750 worth of funding from the Ohio GSS (I also received rejections from two other applications), but overall I am confident I will at minimum have enough money to comfortably be in the field May-August in 2013.  I also advanced to candidacy which means I can mostly focus on research for the remainder of my time at Ohio University.  Finally, I recently updated my website with some new content and changed the style around a bit.   The most important update was the addition of a new photo page which will display photo from all of my travels and field seasons.

The past few months included a few entertaining research activities including a trip to Vancouver, BC for the 7th World Congress of Herpetology and a quick 5 day trip down to my field sites to collect data loggers.

The World Congress of Herpetology was a great experience.  I flew into Berkeley, CA and drove up to Vancouver, BC with the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology crew. I obviously enjoy conferences for the exposure to cutting edge research, but it is also great to catch up with friends that are scattered all over the world.  Because I am so late on this update I will just include some photos I took at the World Congress including an awesome tailed frog (Ascaphus truei) we found before we drove back to California.

I will post about my fall field work in the next couple days.  The adventure includes bears, elk, and damaged expensive equipment!  So much fun!