I am very interested in migratory birds, and as an undergraduate I completed a project in which I reviewed and presented existing research regarding the effects of climate change on insectivorous passerines.

Specific questions I examined were related to:

• Shifting patterns of food availability within the breeding range of long-distance migrants.

• Changes in bird abundance as a function of food availability and migration strategy (e.g. long- or short-distance).

• Plasticity of avian responses to warming temperatures, and the degree of any such changes.

Most of the literature I reviewed concerned Paleotropical migrants; therefore, I am now interested in learning more about the condition of Neotropical migratory birds, especially in their wintering habitat.

I designed and implemented a project with the goal of visualizing changes in the distribution of eBird records across a spatiotemporal area that I defined.

To accomplish this, I created a geodatabase and examined records for six species in eight middle Tennessee counties from the year 2000 to 2014 using data from eBird and the following tools in ArcGIS:

• Mean Center

• Directional Distribution (standard deviation = 1)

• Various cartographic and data management tools

I created everything in my final layouts using only the eBird dataset (which contained information such as species, date, and coordinates), a U.S. counties map layer from ESRI, and an ArcGIS Online basemap.

Completing this project cemented my belief that GIS is an essential tool for evaluating the spatial component of any ecological inquiry, and reinforced my desire to incorporate such analysis into my future work.

Recent publications have illustrated the potential applications of GIS to questions of changes in avian migration timing as a response to climate change, and I am interested in learning more about how anthropogenic disturbances (such as climate change) affect species' distributions.

In May 2014 I traveled to Costa Rica with a small group of students and professors from Tennessee Tech University's Departments of Biology and Earth Sciences. I was enrolled in a course (Ecology of Costa Rica) to prepare for the trip, and spent seven full days in the country.

While in Costa Rica, we visited three natural areas:

• Tortuguero National Park

• Arenal Volcano National Park

• Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve

I was amazed by the variety of wildlife we saw, including birds (I added 129 species to my life list); reptiles and amphibians; mammals; and numerous invertebrates. Equally remarkable was the culture of conservation that Costa Ricans have embraced, and I was extremely impressed by the agricultural practices in many areas, particularly in the shade coffee plantations and organic farms. As a result of the experience, I am now very interested in the continued conservation of tropical ecosystems and the wildlife that they support.