A warm welcome to our new PhD Student Kadambari Devarajan that just started the PhD program supervised by Chris Sutherland, University of Massachusetts-Amherst (UMASS, MA) and Simone Tenan (MUSE). Kadambari will be based at the UMASS and will work on a four-year project entitled “Investigating the practical considerations of shifting the focus from single- to multi- species (community) monitoring”.

Focusing on the most widely applied methods in ecological monitoring, detection / non-detection data for estimating occupancy, and count data for estimating abundance, she will use multi-species datasets from across the globe from studies that have been designed with a single species in mind. Using simulations, she will evaluate the sensitivity of these common methods to heterogeneity in within-system but between-species traits such as detectability, distribution, abundance and/or home range size. She will attempt characterize what species characteristics influence most our ability to use data collected from multiple species, how best to design studies for multiple species, and finally provide guidance for both.

To find out more on Kadambary research and interests visit her personal website, and have a look at “ViXeN : View eXtract and aNnotate media, a simple (free and open source) tool designed and developed by Prabhu Ramachandran and Kadambary to facilitate easily viewing, adding, and annotating metadata associated with media. ViXeN has been recently published on Methods in Ecology and Evolution. The pdf of the paper is available here.

Twitter: @kadambarid