加入於:2016 8 月 11 最近活躍:2024 10 月 07 iNaturalist
"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." - Aldo Leopold A Sand County Almanac (1949)
My favorite hobby is iNat, and luckily, I get to use iNat as a tool for my job, too! Life is great! I feel like an explorer when I use iNat, discovering hidden exciting species in my own front yard, an urban parking lot, or a conserved nature habitat. I get really thrilled when I travel and find that I don't know the names of many taxa at first glance, only to realize that they are the cousins of my familiar species back home. I walk around our planet with super powers, in that I can name many taxa while walking and driving around and understand their role in our ecosystem. iNat and my fellow iNat community have taught me so much over the last few years. It's an extremely powerful teaching tool! I make a ton of mistakes, so if you see one, please let me know! And thank you to all of you who have helped me, and the students, with identifications!
I am an ecologist that works at the University of North Texas as an Advanced Environmental Research Institute scholar in the Department of Biological Sciences. I supervise the BIOL 2141 Ecology Laboratory and BIOL 1132 Environmental Science lab courses for undergraduates. I am the advisor for the UNT student chapter of the Society for Ecological Restoration, a member of the UNT Bird Campus, Bee Campus, and Tree Campus committees, and belong to the Trinity Forks Chapter of the Native Plant Society of Texas. I serve as the 'Student Liaison' for the Texas chapter of the Society for Ecological Restoration.
The students and I have worked very hard to reconstruct a native Texas prairie called the UNT Pollinative Prairie, located on the UNT campus. Check out prairie.unt.edu, or the UNT Ecology Facebook page here
https://www.facebook.com/UNTECOLOGY/ and the iNat database of our biodiversity explosion at the prairie since the project began in 2016 https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/university-of-north-texas-pecan-creek-pollinative-prairie
Throughout my career I have researched many taxa including aquatic benthic macroinvertebrates, aquatic biofilms, prairie plants, American Kestrels, marine fish parasites, and bacteria.