Everyone in our lab attended the 2024 Student Conference on Conservation Science, at the American Museum of Natural History’s Center for Biodiversity & Conservation.

We presented one poster on the pro-environmental behaviours (PEBs) of People of Colour. The lead author, Dimitri Mimy, did a fantastic job engaging attendees, including Naveen David (from the University of Toronto) who gave a great talk on his study of environmental values and PEBs. Dimitri’s poster can be viewed here.

We presented a second poster on the urban ecology of eastern skunk cabbage, lead-authored by Oliver Krieger. The other coauthors were Brendan Brozen and Philippe Yahia (undergraduate researchers), Sophie Barno (research intern) and Taylor Rubin (PhD student). Oliver, Brendan and Phil were excellent presenters! The poster can be viewed here.

Shown below are: (at left) Dimitri attending his poster, (centre) Brendan, Oliver and Phil attending the skunk cabbage poster, (right) the entire research group enjoying a celebratory dinner.

And we presented a speed talk on our pilot study of how drones affect bats. We conducted this before-after-control-impact (BACI) experiment in four parks, each with a control microsite and an impact microsite. On each of 20 before nights, we acoustically monitored bats for two hours in both microsites without any drone flights. Each before night was immediately followed by an after night (n = 40) in the same park—the only difference was that on after nights, we had six five-minute drone trials in the impact microsite. Despite the small sample size and noisy data, we detected a negative effect on bats, whose activity declined in response to drone trials. And I was absolutely thrilled when Sophie won the best speed talk award—quite a surprise given that this was the first time any of my lab members have presented anything at any research conference. Massive congratulations to Sophie and to Taylor Rubin and Prof J Stephen Gosnell (Baruch College), both of whom were also coauthors on this talk, which can be viewed here.