Achievement

Building on a 2010 CHANGE-IGERT capstone course project, trainee Erik Olson and associates Ryan Marsh and Brittany Bovard produced a research report for the Aspinall Foundation (an international conservation group) on the socio-ecological complexities surrounding conservation of the critically endangered greater bamboo lemur, Prolemur simus. They also produced two peer-reviewed papers. The first documents their use of camera traps to track and research P. simus. The second shows that P. simus is more frequently observed in less degraded forests, with high variation in canopy heights, natural disturbance, and high densities of Madagascar giant bamboo (one of it’s primary food sources). This bamboo species appears to have evolved to exploit canopy gaps; it has higher densities in areas of both human and natural disturbance. These findings represent an important contribution to the scientific understanding of the microhabitat preferences of P. simus.