Yes! Spring is finally here. The birds are singing, the windows are open, and spotted lanternfly will be soon emerging from their eggs. It has been a few months since iEcoLab posted anything, but do not fear, we have been busy, too busy to post anything. Dr. Helmus (the designated digital outreach person) has been lax in his digital duties. Thus, to keep us all up to date, here a list of recent accomplishments!
– Sampling trip to Aruba and Curacao: Dr. Behm and Helmus visited Aruba and Curacao over the winter break where they distributed biodiversity reports to homeowners and found three new exotic lizard species on Aruba (we will have detailed post about this later). The anole pic is from that trip.
– Three new undergraduate students joined the lab! All three are working on different projects so stay tuned to hear about those in later posts.
– A new paper came out in Nature Ecology and Evolution. This paper was in collaboration with a team of scientists trying to understand how different dimensions of biodiversity can act as surrogates when planning for conservation. You can read about the paper here.
– iEcoLab received more funding from the PA Department of Agriculture to continue their research on modeling the spotted lanternfly invasion (more later).
– Dr. Helmus presented the spotted lanternfly work at a regional summit on spotted lanternfly in Harrisburg.
There are other successes, but that is enough to catch us up for now.