New Year, New Updates

Wow, I’ve been a bit remiss in keeping up with my blog! Well, it’s a new year and time for an update on my progress with my PhD program. This past semester has definitely been a busy one, and time to put all my research ideas into action (or not, depending on feasibility and funding…). This semester has also been an extremely important one in terms of professional development activities. Here are a few of the highlights:

First off, my research project is developing, although it’s still contingent upon funding from grants I’ve applied for. I have encountered feasibility issues with studying Mexican long-nosed bats (for example, they are just under the weight limit to attach GPS units for tracking to foraging areas; they can fly long distances from the roosting cave (up to 20-30 miles) to forage every night, making radio tracking them difficult; and the large entrances of their roosting caves in my study area make mist-netting them difficult) so have had to adjust my plans a bit. The ultimate goal of my work is still to identify areas of agaves where the bats forage so we can work with communities and agave farmers in those areas to develop bat-friendly agave management programs. However, now instead of directly tracking the bats to see where they are foraging, I plan to use infrared cameras set up in agave fields near communities to determine if the bats are using those agaves and how much they are visiting them. I also plan to conduct agave pollination studies to determine how much pollination services the bats are providing to the communities. Finally, I will be conducting interviews and focus groups with the communities and farmers to determine their willingness to adopt “bat-friendly” agave management practices and how to implement these practices. At least that’s the plan for now!

One of the best and most exciting things this semester was attending the North American Society for Bat Research Symposium in Monterey, CA. I hadn’t been to a NASBR meeting since the Costa Rica International Bat Research Conference/NASBR in 2013, and man was it good to attend again! I presented my proposed PhD research and got a lot of good feedback and ideas to pursue. Perhaps the most exciting activity was being part of the first meeting of a new working group for the Mexican long-nosed bat. The group is comprised of researchers (including myself), Bat Conservation International staff, and government department staff. As part of the group I will be helping to revise the Recovery Plan for the species and identify conservation priorities. We are planning to meet again to really get things going this April in Austin, TX. 

Finally, I am working on several publications, a few as collaborations that grew out of attending the International Association of Landscape Ecology meeting and the Ecological Society of America meeting, and one that stems from a paper I wrote for a class last year. I’m really excited to be working on these, and hopefully they’ll be accepted!

Salada Kristen

My first taste of mezcal!

Well it’s been a little while since I’ve posted; sorry for that. The past couple weeks have been full of changes due to weather, logistics, etc. A couple weeks ago we were supposed to visit Infierno Cave (translated as “Hell’s Cave”), the only known maternity cave of Greater long-nosed bats (Leptonycteris nivalis) (where the females have and raise their pups) in Mexico, but we ended up not being able to go because of the rain. The cave is located in the Parque Nacional Cumbres de Monterrey in the mountains south of the city, and with the rain the steep dirt roads were too dangerous to drive on. We ended up staying in the office to get the materials together for our community training program in Sabinas, Coahuila the following week, in which we were going to train about 10 members of the Sabinas community and the Protected Area managers on how to do bat monitoring in the area, including using mist nets, acoustic detectors, and GIS (Geographic Information Systems). That ended up getting pushed back a week and then ultimately cancelled, but we (Josefo, Temo, Gehu, and I) still went up to Sabinas last week to mist net for bats in the Don Martín Protected Area along the riparian (river) corridor.

Cultural Thoughts

I had a good day today walking around the downtown of the city for the second time. For some reason today several people, both men and women, started chatting with me out of the blue. I felt like I had a sign on my forehead or something! But it was great to practice Spanish, and amazingly I understood them and conversed pretty well. I figured I could share a few of my observations about the culture here, as well as some of my thoughts on things:

1. Apparently Monterrey is the industrial city of Mexico, and therefore isn’t huge with tourists. Since I got here (3 weeks ago) I’ve only seen a handful of non-Mexicans.
2. On the train and subway, it’s customary to give up your seat for the following people: pregnant women, women with small children, elderly people, and handicapped people/people with injuries. They have signs inside the trains/subways showing this. While it’s not explicitly stated on the signs, it’s also customary for men to give up their seat to any

Merry Christmas to Me!

After a day looking through
literature at the university.

I’ve spent the past three days at the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León in Monterrey meeting professors who work with agaves or bats, collecting literature on agaves, and doing a training course for Geographic Information Systems (GIS), led by Josefo. I spent two days in the Department of Ecology looking through the many books, magazines, and theses that Dr. Glafiro José Alanís Flores and Dr. Marcela González Álvarez have in their offices to find literature about agaves. Dr. Flores is an ethnobotanist who studies the sustainable management of plant communities, the uses of plants by people in arid and semi-arid areas, and urban forestry. Dr. Álvarez is a botanist who studies the agaves of northeast Mexico. When Josefo and I visited the university last week they graciously welcomed me to Mexico and the university and were very open to a collaboration with me and UGA. They offered access to their offices to look through their materials, desk space in the lab to work as I read through things, and access to the copy machine. Dr. Álvarez even gave me a gift of a book she and Dr. Flores co-authored on the uses of agaves in Nuevo León. It felt like Christmas! Most of the materials I have found are in Spanish, but I can read Spanish fairly well. However, I made sure to make lots of copies (well, photos to turn into PDFs) so that I can fully read and digest them later. 

I found so much good information! I learned that agaves are the only plants in Mexico that people use in their entirety, including the leaves (for fiber, rope, clothing, material to build houses, and fodder for livestock), the stalk (which is grilled for food), the sugar/sap (which is consumed as agua miel or the fermented pulque, or turned into mezcal or tequila), the spines (for needles), and the roots

Welcome to Mexico!

About to land in Monterrey!

Welcome to my new blog about my PhD research adventures in Mexico! I’m starting this blog while I am in Mexico for my first summer of field work, but I hope to continue the blog past this summer to follow my future field seasons and other research-related things such as attending conferences and developments of my research. So far I’ve been in Mexico for two and a half weeks (out of a total of six); sorry for not getting around to writing this blog sooner but I hope this first post will get everyone caught up! (A little disclaimer about the photos/margins: I tried to make the margins around the photos consistent and even, but for some reason Blogger would not accept my changes, so please forgive the poor formatting. I will work on fixing the problem in future posts, but Blogger apparently is stubbornly resistant to accepting changes to the format, so we'll see.)

Before I get any further though, I’d like to thank the University of Georgia Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute and the Graduate School for providing funding for this first summer of my PhD work. Without their assistance coming here would have been much, much harder. Their support is invaluable for my first summer of work as I establish contacts in-country and further develop my research questions. Thank you!

I guess some background would be good to start off with: Last August (2014) I started my PhD in the University of Georgia’s Integrative Conservation program (with my home department of the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources). As its