PEOPLE
Dr. Anthony Dell
Ecologist - NGRREC
Adjunct Professor - Washington University in St Louis
Affiliated Faculty - St Louis University
email: tonyidell@gmail.com
web: www.dellecologylab.org
In the lab we fuse metabolic, movement, and community ecology to address basic and applied questions in ecology and evolution. We work towards a fuller understanding of ecological systems across scales, including time, space, and levels of biological organization. We have a growing interest in how the movement and behavior of organisms influence species interactions, and the role of the physical environment. Our work also explores how humans interact with, and are affected by, the natural world, with the goal of producing science that can inform management and policy. See here for more detail about the research in our lab, and here for resulting publications.
Staff
Melissa Schindler
Email: mschindler@lc.edu
Website: http://www.ngrrec.org/Staff/
Melissa is Research Specialist at NGRREC, and helps to manage our lab. She has a Master of Science in Wildlife Ecology/Biology with broad experience and interests that include water quality and community ecology. Currently, Melissa assists on projects in our lab centered on the plastic cycle across the Mississippi River Watershed.
Collaborators
Mike Louison
Email: mjlouison@mckendree.edu
Mike is an assistant professor of biology and environmental studies at McKendree University and a Faculty Research Fellow at NGRREC. Mike is an ecophysiologist and behavioral ecologist interested in how fish respond to human-induced changes to their environment. In the past, Mike's research has focused on the physiological effects of capture and handling on common sportfish species, particularly how this stress response is influenced by abiotic conditions such as water temperature. Currently, Mike is pursuing research examining the effects of microplastic exposure on freshwater fish, the incidence of microplastic contamination in wild fish populations, and the behavioral characteristics that may predispose fish towards consuming microplastics.
Postdocs
Dr. John M. Grady
email: jgradym@gmail.com
website: www.johnmgrady.com
John is a Living Earth Collaborative postdoc, working in conjunction with Wash U Neurobiologist Dr Keith Hengen. John is interested in linking biological levels of organization – from cells to ecosystems - across space and time. For instance, how do individual traits, such as body size or metabolic rate, drive emergent ecological properties, like abundance, diversity, and the division of resources? Johns current postdoc explores how differences in metabolism and thermoregulation shape species interactions and patterns of diversity, particularly among predator-prey interactions between warm-blooded mice and cold-blooded insects at the behavioral and neurological level.
Dr. Stella F. Uiterwaal
email: stellauiterwaal@gmail.com
website: https://sites.google.com/view/stellauiterwaal
Stella is a Living Earth Collaborative postdoc, working in conjunction with Dr Steve Blake (SLU) and Dr Sharon Deem (St Louis Zoo). Stellas LEC project involves the Forest Park Living Lab, which brings together St. Louis’s leading experts in ecology and conservation medicine to create a living ecological experiment inside one of America’s greatest urban ecosystems: Forest Park in St. Louis. Stella is broadly interested in the links between foraging, diet, movement, and biodiversity. She is particularly interested in why predators eat what they do and as much as they do, and how this depends on the predator's traits, community, and environment. She works with everything from protists to spiders to birds, and has developed a particular fondness for owls.
Graduate Students
Preston Pennington
email: p.c.pennington@wustl.edu
Preston is a PhD student at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) program. He is generally interested in the succession and community assembly of island ecosystems with application to habitat loss and biodiversity conservation. In the lab, Preston studies effects of microplastics (MPs) on freshwater fish.
Volunteers / Undergraduates / Interns / Other Affiliates
Grace Witsken
email: gmwitsken@lc.edu
Hi! My name is Grace, I am a sophomore at Lewis and Clark Community College. I am completing my Associate of Science degree this spring, then transferring to complete my B.S. in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation. This semester, I'm an intern at the National Great Rivers Research and Education Center, working under Dr. Tony Dell and Dr. Stella Uiterwaal on the Forest Park Living Lab. I will be combining historical and current bird surveys for analysis, and spending time GPS tagging various birds to better track their movements through and life within Forest Park. Outside of this study, I can most often be found in the Shawnee Forest, working in a K-5 after school program, or at church.
Lab Alumni
POSTDOCS
Dr. Brett Seymoure (2019-2022) Worked on the ecological effects of artificial light at night.
Dr. Carl Cloyed (2015-2018) Worked on variations project related to movement ecology.
Dr. David Daversa (2015-2016) Worked on intraspecific variation in behavior of salamander larvae.
Dr. Tewodros Biresaw (2015-2016) Worked on all things computer vision related (system setup, automated tracking, behavioral annotation, etc).
GRADUATE STUDENTS
Leticia Classen-Rodriguez (Saint Louis University) (2019-2023) Automated tracking to explore the effects of sound pollution on the movement, behavior and trophic interactions of wolf spiders.
Ashley Olson (Federation University) (2017-2022) Phylogenetic structure of Melanesian birds.
Tobias Lauermann (University of Göttingen) (2013-2014) The allometry of movement in a forest floor food web.
VOLUNTEERS/ UNDERGRADUATES/ INTERNS
Isaac Evans (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) (Fall 2023) Statistical analyses on effects of microplastic exposure on golden shiner (Notemigonus crysoleucas) swimming performance
Grace Witsken (Lewis and Clark Community College) (Fall 2023) The effect of development on avian species diversity in Forest Park
Molly Cannon (Heidelberg University) (Summer 2023) “Effects of microplastic exposure on foraging and swimming performance in bluegill (Lepomis macrochirus)”
Isabel Montano (Lewis and Clark Community College) (Summer 2023) “Effects of microplastic exposure on foraging and swimming performance in bluegill (Lepomis macrochirus)”
Julie Amoroso (Scripps College) (Summer 2023) The effect of light intensity on wolf spider foraging
Isaac Evans (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) (Summer 2022) “Assessing potential for microplastic ingestion in fathead minnows (Pimephales promelas) as a function of group size”
Jacob Forbes (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) (2020) The effects of temperature on collective behavior
Max Wasserstrom (Ladue Horton Watkins High School) (2019-2020) Are animals are capable of digesting plastic?
Nicholas Wells (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) (Summer 2018) Does plastic move up a freshwater food chain?
Hanna Benson (Ohio University) (Summer 2018) Quantifying microplastics in the Mississippi River & tributaries
Elizabeth Green (Middlebury College) (Summer 2016) Movement ecology of amphibians
Tracie Hayes (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) (Summer 2016) Temperature and size effects on movement and behavior in a freshwater snail
Oleksandr Loyko (City University of New York) (Summer 2016) Applications of 3D video (Microsoft Kinect) in ecology
Laura Cappella (SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry) (Summer 2015) Used camera traps to monitor vertebrate assemble structure across the landscape
David Tilson (Virginia Polytechnic Institute) (Summer 2015) Used camera traps to monitor vertebrate assemble structure across the landscape
Ina-Kathrin Spey (University of Göttingen) (2013) Effects of temperature on use of a dispersal corridor
Sania Pouyanrad (UCLA) (2010-2012) Automated tracking of the functional response
Dalit Yadegaran (UCLA) (2010-2012) Automated tracking of the functional response