Lizard Camp
The goal of lizard camp is to provide hands on training that enables students from underrepresented backgrounds to learn how to be a scientist. We recruit teams of undergraduate, post-baccalaureate, and graduate students to work as a team to study lizards in desert ecosystems around the world! The teams develop questions and methods for the particular ecosystem of interest, and then learn how to analyze the data and present the answers they find to a broad audience.
Results and Impact
2024 — Chihuahuan Desert, Texas: 8 students coming from 3 universities and 4 states participated in a natural history and research training experience.
2023 — Bouhedma National Park, Tunisia: 8 Tunisian students, 2 US teaching assistants, and 2 Tunisian collaborators examined the relationship between morphology and habitat use (Utsumi et al. in review).
2022 — Salt Basin Sand Dunes, Texas: based on the dunes on the west side of Guadalupe National Park, 5 students and 1 post-doctoral collaborator worked to examine habitat use (Orton et al. 2024) and escape behavior (manuscript in preparation) in a blanched population of earless lizards.
2021 — Chihuahuan Desert, Texas: 7 students gathered at the Dalquest Desert Research Station to collect behavioral and ecological data to address the question, “how do members of the same species that are similar in size partition food and space?” (Tryban et al. in review).
2020 — Great Basin Desert, Oregon: 10 students participated in project focusing on the social networks and space use of 2 sympatric lizards with different foraging modes (manuscripts in preparation).
2019 — Chihuahuan Desert, Colorado: 13 student participants examined the difference between youngsters and adults in where and how they move (Kusaka et al. 2021).
2018 — Chihuahuan Desert, Colorado: 12 students participated on project devoted to delineating the influence of habitat structure on movement dynamics (Utsumi et al. 2019).
2017 — Great Basin Desert, SE Oregon: 8 students participated investigating how foraging mode influenced movement and habitat use in two sympatric lizard species (McAlpine et al. 2023; results presented at SICB 2018)