What is your team doing this summer and can you give me an update on your research, overall?

We had our photos tagged by this past March and now they're being analyzed by our collaborators in the Urban Wildlife Information Network to start answering the question “How have animals adapted to changing human activity patterns during the COVID-19 stay at home orders?” So that was amazing!

The high school SIFT students and our WashU Tyson Conservation Corps undergraduate students, all tagged photos. We were able to do group tagging sessions on Zoom throughout the academic year. Last fall, we also recruited Master Naturalists from Missouri and Illinois. These are people living in our community who are really interested in wildlife and the outdoors. Our technician at the time, Paul, did a training session for them over Zoom, so they also have been tagging all year. We've grown a volunteer base, remotely. Because of them, now we can start asking a lot of the questions, which is great!

To start our research for this year I have two students working on the collected data from the St. Louis Wildlife Project. We’re also trying to set up another transect into our study. [A transect is a path along which one counts and records occurrences of the objects of study.] The current study path connects the Arch to a point west at Route 66 State Park. That encompasses such a small snapshot of St. Louis ecological variability. So now we’re trying to establish a transect that goes from north to south, maybe one that links up with the Saint Louis Zoo's new property in Spanish Lake. We've been working with some of the landscape architects on the Danforth Campus who are working on Peace Park in the College Hill area of North City. We have another one at Harris-Stowe State University. These cameras will eventually be integrated into the second transect with another 25 or so cameras for mammals and audio monitors for bats and birds.

Do you think hope has a place in the research you do?

I had no choice but to find hope in our research this past year. We were able to do so much with so little. To get people engaged in this work, even from their couches, is wonderful. It’s really uplifting to still connect with our collaborators through Zoom and still be able to joke around and have a great time. And sometimes you just needed that. Our core staff are all close. We work on everything together and bounce ideas off each other. So that was hard. But there were times when Susan and I would be working at home, not working on anything together, we’d just zoom and chit-chat or talk things out. It has been difficult, but we were still able to do it. And now it seems kind of like forever ago.