Chris Rota

Right now I have active research projects with white tail deer in West Virginia, bobcats in South Dakota, Canada warblers here in West Virginia and songbirds in the Monongahela National Forest. Our goal with all this is to understand habitat use and demography of these species and use novel and modern quantitative techniques to address problems.

We’ve learned lots of cool stuff. For example, we’re putting geolocators on Canada warblers. What that does is allows us to track the migration movements of these tiny little birds. They weigh 10 or 11 grams, so we can’t put heavy tracking devices on them. We put little geolocators on them. So these tiny little birds come from West Virginia and go down to South America. Some of them are going to winter in Colombia and Venezuela. They fly all the way back to West Virginia to the exact same spot. We recapture them and get the geolocator and learn about the migration strategies.

Another student is studying the effect of climate change on Appalachian song birds. She’s taking historic data and learning about how land use and climate influence the current distribution of these birds and using that to project how their distribution will change in the future. We’re able to predict the future distribution of several Appalachian song birds.

I’ve had a bobcat project for a couple of years in South Dakota. We’re learning that kitten survival out there is a little bit lower than expected and we think it might be tightly tied to the dynamics of cottontail rabbits out there.