Kimberly A. Franklin is a doctoral
student in the Insect Science Interdisciplinary Program at the
University of Arizona. Her research interests combine insect diversity
and remote sensing, in the context of developing tools for identifying
areas of high conservation priority and assessing the effects of
anthropogenic disturbance and ecosystem functions. The integration
of remotely sensed data with ground measurements of insect diversity
promise to be a powerful means of reaching these goals, because
insects play important roles in almost all ecosystem processes
and because a large amount of spatially distributed data can be
collected for them.
Kimberly's dissertation research concerns the effects of the conversion
of desert habitats to exotic grass pastures within the Sonoran
Desert, a widespread and serious environmental problem that threatens
the ecological integrity of large areas of the desert Southwest.
Her specific research focus is on ants, a particularly important
insect group in deserts, and on buffelgrass, which has spread widely
throughout both the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts both by intentional
cultivation and by invasion. Using the conversion of Sonoran desert
and thorn scrub ecosystems to buffelgrass pastures as a model system
and ants as an indicator group, she is examining the effects of
land conversion on biodiversity and ecosystem productivity and
to address the potential to restore the structure and diversity
of biological communities after land conversions. Kimberly carried
out the preliminary phases of this work as a Fulbright Scholar
in Mexico in 2005-2006.
Kimberly received her B.A. in Biology from the New College of
Florida, Sarasota, Florida, in 2001.
Ultimately, her goal is to apply the knowledge gained through
her Ph.D. work to a career focused on the conservation of biodiversity
in the desert Southwest. |
Charles A. Price is a doctoral candidate
in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, College
of Science, University of Arizona. His dissertation research focuses
on the scaling of mass, morphology and functional traits through
space and time in Sonoran Desert plant communities. While several
studies have explored select plant trait distributions across biomes,
this study is intended to quantify a suite of such traits across
the majority of species within an arid, terrestrial plant community.
The large-scale plot (5 ha) in the Sonoran Desert uplands on which
he is conducting his research will, furthermore, allow this arid
system to be compared with similarly mapped tropical or temperate
forest plots. Traits whose distributions will be analyzed include
plant height, spread, basal stem diameter, leaf level N:P, stem
tissue density, water potential and allometrically based estimates
of wet, dry and water mass. Soil water content, porosity, and nitrogen
and phosphorus content are also being sampled at regular spacings
within the plot to explore the influence of abiotic resource distributions
on these plant traits and on community composition.
As a graduate student, Charles received the Forrest Shreve Award
from the Ecological Society of America in 2004. As an undergraduate,
he received a University of Arizona Research Training Grant in
2002. He was also one of two students at the University of Tennessee,
Knoxville, to be selected by the Chancellor as a member of the
Chancellor's Committee for the Environment, from 1999-2001. He
was a member of the Honors Program in the Department of Ecology
and Evolutionary Biology at UTK and was selected by his department
as the Most Outstanding Senior of 2001. He received his B.S. degree
cum laude from UTK, with a double concentration in Ecology (honors)
and Biochemistry. |
