Elise Nishikawa

technician

“We live on a really cool planet. We live on a really, really cool planet!”

Elise’s passion for nature has roots in her childhood as a Girl Scout. Along with environmentally conscious parents and a keen eye for birds, she’s accumulated a rich source of firsthand field experience to share – traveling everywhere from Peru, Florida, California, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, and Panama to work on different avian research projects. Now, she comes to Tyson with a wealth of encyclopedic bird knowledge, ready to collect ticks.

“I enjoy research, learning new things, and just trying to find out more about how the world works. Doing cool stuff every day; that’s the joy of ecology. I’m having so much fun with this season’s group. Learning about ticks is fascinating now, whereas before I didn’t think about all their bizarre life history.”

As is clear from her prior work, Elise is very interested in conducting long-term research. Especially given the large-scale biodiversity loss and rapidly changing climate, long-term perspectives have the power to really highlight how much change is actually going on right before our eyes.

“What I really want to do is long-term ecological monitoring. It’s really hard to come up with good questions in ecology without a solid base of knowledge. Ecology is complicated, everything is connected, and if you change one thing then you could also change something else that you thought was totally unrelated.”

Elise worked with Solny Adasteinsson's Tick & Wildlife Ecology team during summer 2019. Learn more about their prescribed fire and tick-borne disease ecology research here.