Project Description: Climate induces changes in biodiversity that can amplify public health concerns especially in urban environments. An overlooked outcome of exposure to high ambient temperature is varied animal behaviour that affect human-wildlife interactions, exacerbating human-wildlife conflict. Here we use detection data compiled from camera trap surveys across 23 North American cities to investigate how heat stress metrics alter space use and activity patterns in conflict-prone mammals (e.g., deer, raccoons, and coyotes). Specifically, we obtain daily temperature data at camera locations to determine area- weighted average temperature and use general circulation models to project into 2100. With these data, we then investigate relationships to animal activity, species richness, and space use as well as apply proximity and hotspot tools to determine a zone of influence in the context of human population density. Ultimately, results from this project will identify the most vulnerable neighborhoods across North American cities to aid in designing interventions, building awareness, and promoting coexistence to ensure healthy human and wildlife populations as all urban dwellers cope with changing climates.

Project Description: Fire activity is a major Earth system process, with strong feedbacks to both biosphere and atmosphere, but global climate models continue to fall short in accurately predicting future carbon cycle and climate changes from fires. Paleofire data from lake and marine sediment cores extend satellite and historical records of past fires enabling the evaluation and improvement of Earth system models under diverse environmental conditions. This project will produce new paleoecological records of highly fire-prone grassy ecosystems in Africa. Funding will also support collaboration with a Kenyan scholar to compile and synthesize existing paleoecological records into a global database from which we will construct global estimates of biomass burning since the Last Glacial Maximum, 21,000 years ago. The improved estimates of African and global fire activity will be compared with model outputs to improve estimates of pre-industrial fire emissions. Accurate fire emissions estimates are essential for understanding modern-day aerosol forcing and carbon storage in ecosystems, which can in turn support better policy and decision making about a wide range of climate change mitigation and adaptation options.

Project Description: The Indonesian Archipelago is vast, with more than 17,000 islands spanning an area about the size of the continental USA. Indonesia is at the heart of the Coral Triangle, a diversity hotspot for many groups of marine organisms. This abundance and diversity of marine animals is fundamental to the Indonesian economy, culture, and well-being, and fascinating in its own right. Different explanations for this extreme diversity have been proposed. The primary challenge to teasing apart these explanations is that the biodiversity of marine invertebrates in Indonesia remains poorly described, and understood, relative to many other regions.

The Yale team will work with Indonesian scientist Dr. Hagi Yulia Sugeha and her students at the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) to build local capacity for biodiversity research and initiate biological inventories and population studies of multiple marine species, including jellyfish. This project includes fieldwork in Indonesia, but that is paired with multiple visits by Indonesian scientists to Yale for training, museum work, and lab work.