I will be visitng several sites throughout South America from July 25 – August 25. I am really looking forward to meetign with all of my Colleagues who have contacted me about possible study sties throughout the region. I do have soem free time in my schedule while in Brazil (Brasilia 8/18-21) and Rio (8/25-26) if anyone is interested in meetign with me and chattign about corrisors please feel free to contact me at andrew.gregory@nau.edu.
Thanks and Much Peace,
Andy
Greetings,
Just a quick post to let everyone know that next week we will be at the North America Section Meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology in Oakland, CA. We have been selected to give a 4 min speed presentation at 11 AM on Tuesday, and we look forward to chating with any interested persons so please keep your eye peeled for us or email me at andrew.gregory@nau.edu, if you wish to arrange a specifc time to meet and chat about corridors.
Much Peace,
Andy
Greetings all,
Over the past few months we have been visiting corridor sites and having a great time meeting with many of you. Things are going well and we have several locations that will likely be included in the study. However, to makes this study work and to find > 100 landscapes which meet our criteria we will need >>>100 landscapes suggested. Consequently, we are still in need of your help. Please if you have a landscape in mind, but have been on the fence or just too busy to let us know about it, please take a minute to help us out. You can suggest sites either via this website, or just email me directly at docorridorswork@gmailcom. In other news I will be visiting several sites in Central and South America from about July 25-August 16. If you have a site in mind that you think I should visit, let me know and perhaps we can schedule a time for me to stop by.
Thanks,
Andy
Greetings all,
It’s been a very interesting, hectic, and productive few weeks for us. We had a terrific visit to Europe and looked at corridors in the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Spain and France. Big thanks to all of those who met with me while I was visiting for all of your hospitality and keen insights into our corridor work. While in Europe, our PLoS Biology article came out; I’ve placed a link to the article on our home page if you’d like to check it out, and there was also an article published about us in New Scientist. You can find a link to that article on the useful links page. As a result of this publicity we’ve had many people come forward with suggested sites. In addition, our social media campaign on Research Gate, LinkedIn, and Facebook has started to provide some promising leads as well. While Paul and I are very excited about all of these possible leads, and very grateful to all of you who have taken the time to suggest study sites to us, we are still >60 sites short of our goal of 100+ study sites, so please keep on suggesting landscapes. In the meantime for those of you who have suggested sites, I will be in contact with you soon to start arranging times for me to come and visit with you about your suggested study site in person.
Hope to meet with all of you soon.
Sincerely,
Andy
Greetings all,
Just a quick update to let you know that I will be in Europe visiting some potential study sites from 23-January until 10-February. If any of you have some sites that you would like to tell me about or show me, I might have some time available from 1-3 February and would be happy to come visit you and your corridor site. Thanks and look forward to hearign from you all in the near future.
Sincerely,
Andy
Greetings all,
Big thanks to all of you who have viewed this website, and an ever bigger thank you all of those who have taken time to suggest potential study sites to us. I’d like to take a minute here to address a couple of points of confusion that have come to my attention about our landscape criteria:
First, this website describes the ‘ideal’ landscape configuration we are looking for. However, we are interested in all types of landscape configurations. So please don’t feel that we wouldn’t be interested in your landscape, because we are interested in it, and the only way you’ll know if it is truly appropriate for our study or not is to let us know about it. So please take a minute to tell us about any landscape you know of that might meet even some of our criteria.
Secondly, we do NOT want to study merely developed and planned conservation corridors. Rather, we want to study what we have termed de facto corridors. But, what is a de facto corridor? A de facto corridor can be thought of as an accidental corridor which exists as a quirk of how the landscape surrounding it was developed.
I hope this helps clear things up, and I look forward to hearing form many of you about your accidental corridors.
Thanks,
Andy
Greetings,
Thank you to all our colleagues who have responded to our request for study sites. To date, with your help we have located about 15 sites which appear, on paper at least, to meet most if not all of our criteria. While we are excited about this fantastic response to our request for study site suggestions, and are eagerly looking forward to visiting these sites to make the final determination as to their ultimate suitability for our analysis, we are still in need of at least 80 more locations, particularly in other parts of the world than the United States. So please keep suggesting landscapes to us. To help with this, I’d like to address one common misconception that many have had about the types of landscapes that we are looking for. We are not necessarily looking for landscapes that contain designed corridors, what we are looking for are landscapes which contain elements that resemble landscapes with corridors (e.g. connected habitat patches, isolated patches, and large blocks of habitat). Thus, if you think you know of a landscape, any landscape, please take a minute and let us know about it.
Thanks,
Andy and Paul
Greetings all,
Since our mass emailing on July 21 and our posting on the International Biogeography Society Blog on July 25, we have been in contact with numerous conservation scientists and practitioners around the world, and have numerous excellent candidate sites suggested to us. THANK YOU to all of you have taken the time to suggest sites to us, or taken the time to pass information about our study along to other interested parties. However, despite the success of our email and Blog postings we are still in need of more candidate sites. So for those of you who may have been on the fence about a site, please let us know about it, or for those of you who know of a site and have been just too busy to suggest one please try to find a minute and let us know, either through the suggest a site form on this website or by contacting me directly via email at docorridroswork@gmail.com. Again thank you for your support of this project and I look forward to meeting with many of you over the upcoming months.
Sincerely,
Andy
Greetings all,
On Thursday, July, 21 we sent out a mass email to many of our colleagues around the world (copy of the email text included below). At this time we are still looking for study sites and for those of you who have responded with potential sites we will be contacting you shortly – thanks for taking the time to read our email and respond. Also, I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome any new comers to our website. Hopefully you will find the information on this site useful and will be able to suggest a study site for us. In order to find suitable landscapes for our analysis we are depending on you (our colleagues, friends, and conservation minded public) to help us find study sites, so please share this site with your friends and colleagues. One of the easiest and quickest ways you could do this is to take a minute now, go to our Facebook page, and ‘Like’ us there. Thanks again for all your support and interest thus far and we look forward to working with many of you in the near future.
Thanks,
Andy
CC of the mas email sent out on Thursday, July, 21, 2011.
Dear colleague,
Please excuse this unsolicited email. Please take a minute to consider whether you can recommend a good study site, and to forward this message to appropriate colleagues.
We (Paul Beier and Andy Gregory) need your help to find study sites at which we can assess the ability of big corridors (the sort of corridors typically proposed as conservation interventions) to promote long-term gene flow. Many studies have demonstrated that short linear features promote animal movement over short distances when the area outside the corridor is relatively natural, but we are interested in corridors over a half-mile long embedded in urban, row crop, or industrial areas. And we don’t want to measure success in terms of movement of individual animals; instead we will measure success in terms of long-term gene flow. Thus we need landscapes that have been stable for 20 to 50 years – long enough that the pattern of corridors and patches will have affected genetic patterns. We seek about 100 landscapes (each with 1 or more corridors) for our study, and we will study landscapes on all continents. We need many landscapes because doubtless some corridors provide gene flow across human-dominated areas, and other corridors fail to do so. With a large sample, we can identify what traits are associated with successful corridors.
Although we are highly selective about what landscapes we will study, we will study any reptile, amphibian, mammal, flightless arthropod, or sedentary bird that is likely to be found in the corridor, but not in the human-dominated matrix.
Please suggest appropriate landscapes for this study (and learn more about the study design and rationale) at docorridorswork.org. Even if you delete this email quickly, please remember the URL (DoCorridorsWork.org) in case you later realize that you know of a good site. We are offering finders a small finder’s fee, and immediate access to the genetic data from your site. Please forward this email to anyone you think may be able to help! Thank you.
On behalf of the research team I would like to welcome you to our website and thank you for taking the time to visit. In the future this link will have updates about the study sites we’ve found, papers we’ve published, and information we’ve obtained about corridors and corridor ecology.
At this time our major effort on this project has been to prepare and submit a manuscript which we have playfully titled “Desperately seeking stable 50-year-old landscapes with patches and long, wide, corridors.” The title of this manuscript really does capture the essence of where we are at on this project at this time, as well as the major reason for the website you are currently visiting. Right now we are desperately in need of study sites which meet our criteria listed on the “Study Site Criteria” link above.
If you think you know of a study site that we should know about, please follow the “suggest a study site” link and let us know. If you can think of someone who should know about our site, please let them know. If you support the work we are trying to do, please use the “Share/Save” button at the bottom of this screen to share our site with social media outlets or colleagues to help get the word out about our study.
Thank you for visiting our website and we look forward to future collaborative efforts with many of our colleagues.
Sincerely,
Andy
