But what about the birds that are rescued and brought to wildlife rehabilitators? In August 2021, Ar Kornreich, a Fordham biology Ph.D. student who is working on a dissertation about catbirds, began investigating how many of those birds also succumb. 

“I knew not all birds die immediately, and I wondered if there had been any research on birds that make it for a while before they die,” said Kornreich, who uses they/their/them pronouns.

“It just seemed like a no-brainer that states should have that info.”

In fact, Kornreich discovered that there is no one place where one can easily access this information. So they filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with eight state agencies tasked with regulating the wildlife rehabilitators. They requested records regarding avian building collision cases between 2016 and 2021. Eventually, they received responses from six states, Washington D.C., and several privately run rehabilitators.

Findings

Kornreich and their co-authors published their results on Aug. 7 in the paper “Rehabilitation outcomes of bird-building collision victims in the Northeastern United States” in the journal PLOS ONE.

They and their co-authors found that of the 3,033 birds that were rescued in these areas, about 60% didn’t ultimately make it: 974 died during treatment, while 861 had to be euthanized. The data also revealed that birds were injured more often during the autumn months, and concussions were the most common injury. 

These numbers—and the estimates that can be drawn from them—suggest that bird collision deaths far exceed one billion each year in the U.S., the paper says.

“There’s a huge blind spot in those birds that hit buildings and survive, at least for a little while, and looking at rehabilitation data can help remove that blind spot and help us make more informed decisions about conservation and preventing window collisions for bird populations,” Kornreich said. 

There are gaps in the data. The State of New York refused to release the data for all 62 counties in the state, for instance, so Kornreich limited their request to 10 counties in the New York metropolitan region. 

The data also came in formats as varied as PDF files and handwritten pages that needed to be painstakingly transcribed. What had initially seemed like an easy project that could be done while the world was on lockdown during the pandemic turned out to be anything but, said Kornreich. 

“It was funny; I had to buy the state of Pennsylvania a USB drive so that they could send me all of their data,” they said, laughing.

“I completely underestimated how much work it was going to be.”

Working with a Fordham Grad

To help make sense of the data, Kornreich partnered with Mason Youngblood, a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University. Dustin Partridge, Ph.D., GSAS ‘2020, from the NYC Bird Alliance, and Kaitlyn Parkins, GSAS ’15, from the American Bird Conservancy, served as advisors and co-authored the paper.

Kornreich said they’re hopeful that this research will help wildlife rehabilitation improve their desire and ability to share information. Just as hospital administrators share data on how patients fare after entering their doors, so too should wildlife rehabbers be open, they said.

“There is a very active community of rehabbers who are constantly swapping information and doing their best to make sure that their triage is data-driven and they’re using the most successful treatments,” they said. 

“But sometimes the rehab, scientific, and policy community’s transmission of information isn’t the most efficient. Some people in the scientific community look down on rehabbers and say they’re not really making a statistically significant difference, but I think that they are. They’re on the front lines of this crisis, so it is important to get their data and their viewpoints into this conversation.”

Blame it on the mulberry, birch, and oak trees if you’re in Manhattan, said Guy Robinson, Ph.D., where Fordham University maintains the only official pollen monitoring station in the city. Those three species dominated Robinson’s latest sample slides heading into what’s traditionally the peak pollen weeks of the season—the first two weeks of May.

Robinson maintains and collects pollen samples from the station, located at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on 60th Street east of Columbus Avenue, as well as another station at Fordham’s Louis Calder Center in Armonk, New York. Throughout the spring and summer, he feeds the data to the National Allergy Bureau of the American Academy for Allergy, Asthma & Immunology and posts a spreadsheet on @FordhamPollen on X as a public service.

Robinson has been at it for 25 years, while teaching biology and paleoecology in the Department of Natural Sciences, first as a senior lecturer at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, now as a visiting scholar. Once a week, on Tuesdays, he hops up on a wall outside the McMahon residence hall on 60th Street and unwraps a clear inch-wide strip of tape from a cylinder in the Burkard spore trap. The cylinder makes one complete turn in a week. The top of the machine spins like a weather vane, capturing the microscopic particles that cause the seasonal suffering of so many.

After coiling the tape into a metal canister, he carries it to a biology lab in Lowenstein. There Robinson snips the tape into segments—one for every 24-hour period. Then he begins the tedious process of counting pollen particles. 

On April 30, peering through a microscope while working a rudimentary clicker counter with his left hand and making notes with his right, Robinson said that by now, he recognizes most of the different tree pollens “just at a glance.” That’s how he gets the number we all know as the “pollen count”—the number of pollen particles per cubic meter of air. 

He added, “Humans are still better at counting pollen than any machine.” 

No More Sycamores

Robinson has a paper in review now for the Urban Design and Planning Journal suggesting that municipalities should take into consideration the effects of allergens when creating their tree-planting plans.

“They do not need to be planting sycamores in the city,” he said, noting that the species is highly allergenic. Fortunately, the sycamore pollen numbers are already subsiding for this season.

Trees like cherry, hawthorne, and pear, with noticeable flowers, he said, are not major contributors to allergies because they are insect pollinated (the pollen is not carried by the wind).

Those wreaking the most allergy havoc are oak, birch, alder, walnut, sycamore, and elm. Pine pollen is not a major allergen, although pines produce a lot of pollen, he said.

Every year is slightly different in terms of timing and quantity of pollen, said Robinson. But tree pollen nearly always peaks in the same order each year, with sycamore pollen appearing first. 

So what can you do if you are allergic to pollen?

“What we learned during COVID is that what does seem to have helped is wearing a mask,” Robinson said.  “Even the cheapest ones filter out most of the pollen.”

On the one hand, Kausch, a Ph.D. student based at Fordham’s Louis Calder Center biological field station, is studying the causes and consequences of harmful algal blooms (HABs) in New York metropolitan area lakes.

For the last six years, that has involved traveling to about 20 lakes in and around New York City and collecting water samples to determine concentrations of dissolved nutrients, chlorophyll, and phytoplankton species composition. Algal blooms are a big concern now, and in fact, the State of New York has dedicated $82 million to combat them in places such as Lake Carmel in Putnam County, one of Kausch’s sites. In addition to appearing as foam or scum on the surface of the water, the blooms can produce toxins that make people and animals sick. Preventing explosive growth of these microscopic organisms is so key to his work, that the tentative title of his dissertation is “Causes and consequences of cyanobacteria harmful algal blooms in New York metropolitan area lakes.”

On the other hand, despite trying to prevent the blooms, he happens to be fascinated by them.

“I’ve always been interested in the smallest life forms. I certainly think they’re the most interesting life forms, and many times, the most important ones,” said Kausch, a native of Queens who earned a master’s degree in applied environmental geosciences at Queens College.

“They can also cause some substantial problems for humans. Climate change and nutrient loading, which is when human activity triggers the release of nitrogen and phosphorus, are happening pretty much all over the world, so in the last few decades it seems like there’s been an explosion in the occurrence and the intensity of harmful algal blooms.”

Last month, Kausch, who goes by the Twitter handle @NYCMicrobes, tweeted out the view he’s had in the lab with the wider world. With the aid of an Em1 portable microscope and an iPhone, he created videos of several algae, including synura, oocystis, and his favorite, euglena, flitting and bouncing around in their aquatic world. The videos, which he set to music that he’s recorded with friends, are a side project, but have attracted some attention; the Quebec City newspaper Le Soleil included them in an article published in their science section in July.

“I think these could be good for teaching because I feel like people might be amused by the music, and then also seeing the cool algae moving around,” Kausch said.

When it comes to the research, which Kausch has conducted under the supervision of John Wehr, Ph.D., the most intriguing finding is that in the lakes with the highest concentrations of chlorophyll, the concentrations of nitrogen greatly affect the growth of algae. This is important because up until recently, the focus has been on the ways phosphorus can spur growth, rather than nitrogen.

“Historically, efforts to control HABs have focused on reducing phosphorus loads, but in the past decade or so, the literature has increasingly highlighted the importance of dual-nutrient management strategies targeting both nitrogen and phosphorus loading to control HABs,” Wehr said. Both come from waste created by humans.

“Sometimes it’s the nitrogen and phosphorus together, but the point is we as humans create waste in all sorts of ways, and that waste finds its way into water bodies,” he said.

He said one need not go further than Central Park to see how harmful algal blooms can be. Visit the boat rental area, and he noted that you’ll see signs warning against letting dogs swim there because some of the algae produce toxins. Excess use of fertilizer is one culprit; human waste can be another.

“Our use of the environment leads to these hyper-eutrophic, or sometimes hyper-productive situations, which people find aesthetically unpleasing, but in some cases, it’s also biologically undesirable,” he said.

“It changes the structure of the community, biodiversity goes down, we see unpleasant tastes and smells in water bodies, and then occasionally it produces toxins.”

Like Kausch, Wehr said he finds cyanobacteria to be fascinating—one of the remarkable features of some of them is their ability to draw nitrogen from the atmosphere when levels of it in the water start to dip.

“When there isn’t enough nitrogen in the system to keep supporting these blooms, certain species come to the fore and pull nitrogen from the atmosphere, convert it into usable forms, and keep on ticking. It’s quite a remarkable and amazing group of organisms with their adaptations,” he said.

Kausch’s enthusiasm translates into the lab, Wehr said, making him a natural to inspire and mentor undergraduate students. Like most researchers in the lab, he tends also to get more excited by algae-covered bodies of water than the average person would.

“I think his motivation to share some of what he’s been learning with videos and pictures is a good example of how he wants to share what he’s learning, and the excitement of discovery.”

She related all this not at a policy forum or in front of a class, but during her valedictory address at Encaenia in May 2019, taking advantage of the large, attentive audience at the traditional pre-commencement event for Fordham College at Rose Hill graduates and their families.

“This isn’t a story about what I overcame, or what so many of us have overcome. This is a story about how no one should have to,” said Happel, who majored in environmental studies. “There’s still time to fix this, but only if we start right now. Together, we have the power to solve the climate crisis.”

That crisis is getting more public attention because of nature itself, as wildfires have ravaged the West Coast this year and stoked public concern about extreme weather in a warming world. At Fordham, professors who have spent decades observing the effects of climate change offered insight into how science can help frame the need to take action.

Preserving Ecosystems

To build support for climate action, “you have to explain to people that their own survival depends on it, using economic terms and then health terms,” said Craig Frank, Ph.D., associate professor of biological sciences.

With species struggling—and possibly failing—to adapt quickly enough to rapid warming, natural processes that sustain humanity could be disrupted in ways we can’t anticipate, he said. In his own research at the Louis Calder Center, Fordham’s biological field station in Armonk, New York, he has seen eastern chipmunk populations drop by about two-thirds over the past two decades.

Warmer temperatures have changed the chemistry of seeds they feed on, preventing the chipmunks from lapsing into an energy-saving state of torpor while hibernating underground. To make it through a wakeful winter, they often need to gather more food than can be found in the forest, where trees are producing fewer seeds because of hotter and drier summers, Frank said. He estimated that nearly 1,000 mammal species use torpor in one way or another. It’s not clear, he said, how many hibernating species could adapt to environments that are changing at “an artificially rapid rate” due to growing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

“We’re already in a situation where between 20% and 30% of the mammals in the world are threatened with extinction,” a figure that would grow substantially if warming temperatures keep disrupting hibernation, Frank said.

The highest rate of extinction is among plants, said Steven Franks, Ph.D., professor of biological sciences.

He has led or contributed to studies showing how field mustard plants are affected by extreme weather shifts. While they adapt to flower earlier in response to droughts, their seed production suffers, and earlier flowering can leave them more vulnerable to disease, he said. And when the plants respond to wetter periods by evolving to flower later, it’s that much harder for them to readapt when drought returns. The plants used in the studies were harvested in a part of California that, since 2004, has seen several droughts as severe as any in the prior 100 years after seeing only one such drought since 1977.

Drought is having “an enormous effect on many plants, and water scarcity is a really pressing environmental issue,” he said. “The population can be evolving and can even be evolving rapidly, but still not adapting fast enough to keep up with the rate of climate change, and the population still goes extinct.”

The rate of extinctions is accelerating, with about 1 million species—both plants and animals—at risk of dying out, “more than ever before in human history,” according to a 2019 statement by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Many of them could go extinct within decades, the organization said.

Frank highlighted what else could be lost or affected when species die out. “The air that you breathe is a result of natural processes,” he said. “The food that you eat is a result of natural processes. The soil that grows the food is produced by natural process. The water that you drink, that’s a natural process, too. All these are what we call ecosystem services provided to [us].” And yet, “we don’t fully understand how the ecosystems work or how they’re interrelated,” he said.

Using an analogy from the naturalist Aldo Leopold, he likened degraded ecosystems to an airplane losing rivets from one of its wings in midflight. “Each one of these rivets is a species, and we don’t know when the wing is going to fall off,” he said.

Consequences Big and Small

Thomas Daniels, Ph.D., associate research scientist and director of the Calder Center, noted the importance of getting people to care about nature and about future generations—not “by yelling at them,” but by setting an example. National leadership and political will are critical, along with cultivating an appreciation of nature among the young, he said.

Occupying 113 acres, the Calder Center serves as a laboratory where many subtle, still-unfolding impacts of climate change can be seen. Daniels’ own research specialty is ticks, the tiny arachnids that can transmit Lyme disease. Studying their population at the center over the years, he has seen them becoming active earlier in the spring and later into the winter because of rising temperatures. The warming climate has also allowed the Asian tiger mosquito, a possible vector for yellow fever and dengue viruses, to show up in Orange County, New York—“farther north than we expected,” he said.

While this is worrisome, “the larger picture is so much more devastating than vector-borne diseases being an issue,” he said. “The consequences [of climate change] go so far beyond us, and our particular risk in a particular location on a particular day, or in a particular year.”

Those consequences can range widely, from rising seas to food shortages to ocean acidification to an increase in climate refugees who are driven north by rising equatorial temperatures, said physics professor Stephen Holler, Ph.D., who will teach a new honors course on climate change in the spring 2021 semester. Emissions of carbon dioxide from human activity are contributing to the planet’s sixth major extinction event, which follows five others that also correlated with heightened amounts of this greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, he said. The most recent major extinction was the one that wiped out the nonavian dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

He noted the value of showing how people can immediately benefit from actions to curb climate change. As part of the University’s Reimagining Higher Education initiative, launched in spring 2020, his team of faculty and staff members devised a project for communicating climate science through the lens of air pollution and how it affects people who live in the Bronx. It will bring together students from Fordham and from Bronx elementary and high schools to educate the community about air quality, using data from particulate sensors to be placed at the Rose Hill campus and throughout the Bronx.

Their goal is to empower residents to take social or political action about air quality in the borough. The Bronx has some of the country’s highest rates of asthma, which is exacerbated by particulates in the air, Holler said.

Holler’s course will cover social justice aspects of climate change, such as populations displaced from Pacific islands—as well as parts of the U.S.—because of rising seas, in addition to droughts and other environmental impacts.

Taking Action

In her speech at Encaenia, Happel called on her audience to work on climate issues with other members of “Fordham’s amazing global network, [f]rom bankers to biologists, diplomats to dancers.” And she called out one particularly inspiring Fordham graduate, a head of state who is “a powerful voice on the world stage for the rights of island nations.”

That alumna is Queen Quet Marquetta L. Goodwine, chieftess of the Gullah/Geechee Nation. A graduate of Fordham College at Lincoln Center, for the past 20 years she has been the elected leader of this internationally recognized nation populating low-lying coastal areas and islands stretching from North Carolina to Florida. “It’s no stretch of the imagination to say that, someday, her country may simply cease to exist,” Happel said.

To avoid that outcome, Queen Quet has become a high-profile voice on climate issues, speaking at the United Nations and testifying before Congress while also working on smaller, more local efforts. (See related story.) In an interview, she touched on the importance of plain language in describing climate change and getting people to care. One of her projects is devising educational materials to explain the concepts of heat islands and ocean acidification. “Just because we throw around these terms in the environmental world, doesn’t mean the average person knows what we’re talking about,” she said.

Immediate actions can counter the feeling that the issue is too complicated and beyond one’s control, Franks said. It’s important to “promote the positive ways … we can change our major patterns of consumption … in a way that’s really going to be sustainable and beneficial for us as well as natural populations,” he said.

One example is choosing energy sources other than fossil fuels, he said. In her current studies toward becoming an environmental lawyer, Happel is learning about the importance of getting involved in local government to ensure clean energy is an option.

“So much of our energy grid is regulated through state public service commissions,” she said. “Even though I think a lot of us focus on national policy, state and local policy have a huge impact on whether you’re able to have clean energy in your neighborhood.”

Happel’s remarks at Encaenia in 2019 were part of the youth-led “Class of 0000” campaign to focus graduation speeches nationwide on the issue of climate action and convey its urgency.

“So many students and parents came up to me after that and thanked me for it, and said they thought it was really important,” Happel said. “So many people are impacted now. I think the landscape has changed so much, just in the past few years.”

See our related story, “Alan Alda on Creating a Good Communications Climate.”

Au-Yeung’s research focus is multiple sclerosis, one of many conditions for which the company is developing therapies. At Fordham, majoring in biological sciences, she discovered not only the joys of research but also many other sources of inspiration.

What are some of the reasons why you decided to attend Fordham?
Having been raised in small-town Wilton, Connecticut, I knew I wanted to experience college in the city. Fordham was perfect because it also had such a classic campus atmosphere. And I have always valued small classes because I learn best not only by being challenged but also through actively engaging in discussions and debates. So Fordham was the right choice for me because of the smaller classes with passionate professors teaching them.

What do you think you got at Fordham that you couldn’t have gotten elsewhere?
Prior to coming to Fordham, I was only excited to learn about things pertaining to my major, biological sciences, but through the University’s core curriculum, I was exposed to so many different classes I never would have taken otherwise. I’m thankful that I took these courses because they refined the way I question and think about virtually everything: religion, ethics, myself, the health care industry, et cetera. I gained new interests through many of my core courses, such as Buddhism in America, and Intro to Bioethics challenged many preconceived beliefs I had about the healthcare industry and controversial ethicists.

Did you take courses or have experiences at Fordham that helped you discern your talents and interests and put you on your current path?
Originally I was set on going to medical school after graduating and did not consider anything else. To build my resume and earn money, I applied for an undergraduate research grant for the summer of 2017. Working at the Calder Center, I studied the use of eDNA—or DNA that animals leave behind in their environment—as part of biodiversity and conservation studies at the center.

This experience changed everything for me. I enjoyed it so much that I applied for another grant and worked on cell/molecular research in Associate Professor Patricio Meneses’ lab. These academic experiences motivated me to try out industry research, so I applied for an internship with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, where I work now. This internship affirmed for me that I wanted to change my medical school plans and pursue research instead. In the spring before graduating, I worked part time at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, contributing to global HPV and HIV studies, after finding this position through Fordham.

Who is the Fordham professor or person you admire the most, and why?
Patricio Meneses—I took his cancer biology and introductory virology classes, and he was my lab mentor. He helped give me the confidence to pursue the life I wanted after I graduated. His intelligence is admirable and his life story of getting where he is today is inspiring. He didn’t discover his passion or “dream job” by following one path; he went through different career paths, all of which led him to where he is today. It’s admirable because I am a planner, and his story and advice remind me that you don’t necessarily have to know where you want to be a year from now.

Can you describe your current responsibilities? What do you hope to accomplish, personally or professionally?
I’m a research associate working in Regeneron’s Immune and Inflammation Group. My group focuses on autoimmune diseases, but I specifically work on multiple sclerosis. My responsibilities include developing, optimizing, and testing candidate therapeutics for MS in mouse models and downstream analysis of associated disease-related pathologies. My professional goals are to continue learning (since the learning curve is steep), and my long-term goal is to become a scientist.

Is there anything else we should know about you, your plans, or your Fordham connection?
While I love science, I also love to travel, paint, cook/bake, and run long distance. I also would love to be a resource for current pre-med students or help out in any way I can as a proud Fordham alumna.

The 113-acre biological field station allows Fordham students, both graduate and undergraduate, to conduct hands-on research with faculty, said director Tom Daniels, Ph.D., during a virtual tour for parents, alumni, students, and friends held in November.

“We’re one of the few field stations in the country this close to an urban center,” Daniels said. “The mission of the Calder Center, in terms of what studies [are done or not]is entirely at the discretion of our faculty. Their interests are what drives that work here, both in terms of the focus their labs take and in the research projects that the students are working on.”

The tour took the viewers through the Calder Center property, showing off photos of the research facilities, natural beauty, and office space. Daniels narrated to tell those in attendance about the facility’s history, how it’s currently used, what research is ongoing, and what wildlife lives on site.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has put some of their work on hold, Daniels said that the center is hoping to re-engage with volunteers in 2021 to conduct new initiatives, including a “bioblitz,” which will help identify the many different species of plants and wildlife on the property, and a phenology trail, which would help record the life cycle of various species of plants.

A Field Season Like No Other

Suffice to say that after the COVID-19 closures, neither Kornreich nor Pandey, who are studying under the guidance of J. Alan Clark, Ph.D., got the summer of fieldwork that they expected. But thanks to extensive planning and a little bit of ingenuity, both graduate students were able to use what was arguably the safest research facility at the University’s disposal—the woods—to complete crucial data collection.

Clark, an associate professor of biological sciences who specializes in birds, said he was determined to help them salvage the field season, having experienced failed ones twice himself while working on his Ph.D. He credited the center’s director Tom Daniels, Ph.D., and assistant director Alyssa Perrone, with making it possible.

“To lose an entire field season is heartbreaking,” he said. “But by working carefully with the Calder staff, they were able to keep moving forward. They were very fortunate; both of them had highly successful summers, and they were able to do it safely.”

For Kornreich, that meant several changes. Because equipment bottlenecks made the Vesper GPS unavailable, they had to use an old-fashioned boom mic and GPS unit to track catbirds, which produce a cat-like mew call that is sometimes mistaken for mockingbirds. Kornreich also had to wait until June—two weeks later than planned—to begin work, when the University granted permission to go ahead. Even then, Kornreich was limited exclusively to outdoor activity—only essential Calder staff was allowed to enter buildings there.

Staking Out A Vocal Visitor

Once safety protocols were established, Kornreich was able to roam the woods, trapping the birds in nets, banding them, and noting where they’d established distinct territories. In two months, they trapped and tracked 45 birds in six distinct areas.

“If we have two territories very close together, or even if we catch them singing to each other back and forth, we can compare the songs from catbirds whose territories are near each other and see to what degree they match,” they said.

“Based on behavioral observations of how they interact when those songs match, we can draw conclusions about how they’re using that mimicry.”

Kornreich had to forego training on trapping and banding birds, due to social distancing requirements. Even so, they said they still learned a lot on their own about recording in the field and has a better sense of how the birds behave now.

“It’s the sort of quick thinking and adaptation that scientists had to do when COVID hit. A lot of people’s field seasons got straight-up canceled, and even though mine wasn’t, it did necessitate a lot of creative thinking to make the season happen. Dr. Clark deserves a lot of credit for it,” they said.

You Trap Mine, I’ll Record Yours

Pandey and Kornreich contributed to each other’s success. Pandey’s fieldwork, which began last summer when she was a master’s student, also involves trapping birds, but Pandey is less interested in the type of bird she catches, and more interested in potential passengers—tick larvae capable of picking up pathogens from bird hosts.

The peak of her season, in August, was at the tail end of Kornreich’s season, so after she helped capture and band Kornreich’s catbirds, Kornreich paid back the favor by recording data on the birds and ticks Pandey caught. That was valuable because, in the end, Pandey caught and released 180 birds and collected 56 blood samples and 250 larvae.

“When most tick larvae are born, they’re pathogen-free, and if they come off the bird infected, it’s most likely the bird is the source of the infection,” she said.

“That’s what I want to confirm, both by testing the ticks and by sampling the blood from the birds.”

Because there were days when the number of birds caught in their nets reached the double digits, Pandey also relied on both an assistant and a volunteer from the Bedford Audubon Society. Even with COVID-19 related restrictions in place, she had more success than last year, when she caught 395 birds, but only collected 50 blood samples and 164 larvae.

“The first two or three times we went out in the field, it was like ‘OK, are we getting too many birds to handle in our social distanced setup? How do we do this safely and effectively for ourselves and for the birds as well?’ We were able to work those kinks out though,” she said.

Depending on the feedback she receives from her dissertation committee, she may have enough samples to move on to lab work.

Grateful For The Opportunity

Both Kornreich and Pandey said the ability to continue their studies greatly helped them weather the challenges of the pandemic.

“I loved helping Medha in 2019. It had been the highlight of my year, and I was really depressed at the idea that I might not be able to do it myself this year,” said Kornreich, who hopes to return to the woods in 2021 with equipment that allows her to play songs back to catbirds.

“I tried to stay optimistic and focus on what I could do, and what options and equipment I did have, rather than what I no longer could do. Trying to balance the craziness of navigating that new reality, navigating your own panic, navigating the panic of everyone around you, and still trying to think straight about science, can be difficult. But the bottom line is, it did work out.”

“The projects this year run the gamut, from fungus and bats, to lichens to blue-green algae, to an invasive tick, to evolution in lichens, to pollination trials, back to bats and how they are affected by light, and finally diversity in forests,” summarized Thomas Daniels, Ph.D., director of the Louis Calder Center, in his opening remarks. 

In 20-minute-long presentations, seven Fordham students spoke about what it was like to explore the sprawling 113-acre biological field station through CSUR: a 21-year-old program that allows Fordham undergraduates to conduct independent research projects with a Fordham faculty member and a $5,000 stipend. In wooded areas, Ian Sokolowski, FCLC ’20, foraged for Asian long-horned ticks with a white corduroy cloth and forceps. In the middle of Calder Lake, Julia Sese, FCRH ’20, retrieved water samples and analyzed algae blooms. 

Several of the students also shared how their projects began. Joseph Laske, FCRH ’21, recalled the day he found a wild bat while cleaning a Harlem park with members of the Students for Environmental Awareness and Justice club at Fordham. 

“I was raking some leaves, and I heard a squeak. I looked down, and there was this bat curled up on the ground in a fetal position,” recalled Laske, an environmental studies student. 

Concerned about the wild creature’s well-being, Laske snapped a picture of the animal and sent it to his professor, Craig Frank, Ph.D., who studies the effect of white-nose syndrome in bats. Could this bat be affected by the same disease, Laske wondered? 

It wasn’t. But his email sparked a conversation with Frank that would lead to Laske’s application to the CSUR program. For 10 weeks, Laske looked at how white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease, grows at different temperatures and how one species in particular, the Eastern small-footed bat, is able to resist the dangerous disease. 

“Bats are important pollinators [and pest eaters]. They contribute a huge amount to the agricultural industry,” said Laske, who plans on working as a technician in Frank’s lab this fall. 

The keynote address delivered by Alexandria Moore, Ph.D., a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History and adjunct professor at Columbia University, also explored science research. Most of her speech spotlighted her work in coastal wetland restoration. But the rest focused on her identity as a queer person of color and how it informs her work as a scientist. 

“What I have talked about so far today has been sort of referencing gaps: The first one is a gap in our knowledge of how ecosystems work and how we can do a good job at recovering them; the other one is a gap in our understanding of the differences between people and the importance of those differences that people have,” Moore said. “What I do now in my work is combine all of those things together …. What I do at the museum is I ask the same kinds of research questions that I asked at Yale. I ask them in areas where we haven’t asked them with people who never really get to be part of those conversations.”

Sitting in the audience were eight local high school students in Fordham’s Science and Technology Entry Program (STEP)—an academic enrichment program for underrepresented youth from 7th to 12th grade—who presented their summer research posters that afternoon. 

The year before was the first time that STEP students participated in the program. One member of the inaugural cohort will be a first-year student at Fordham College at Lincoln Center this fall, said Patricio Meneses, Ph.D., who helped bring the students to the annual program. 

For DaiJon James, a rising senior at Equality Charter High School in the Bronx, the six-week research experience clarified his career path. It showed him that he wants to become a scientist—a first for his family, he said. But what surprised him this summer was the level of respect and collaboration that he experienced with his Fordham mentors, including Rachel Annunziato, Ph.D. 

“It was kind of like …  jarring because as a teenager, you don’t ever really expect to be given the kind of opportunity to show what you know,” said James, who studied how to best use teletherapy to improve post-procedure care for teenagers with liver transplants. “Working with Dr. Annunziato changed that perspective for me.” 

This summer, another student—Alexa Caruso, a rising senior at New Rochelle High School in Westchester County—performed data collection and analysis on perovskites, a promising material in solar cell research. 

“With the people and the resources that we now have in this day and age, we can definitely make something useful,” Caruso said. “What I did, it’s gonna help the future one day.” 

But a recent study by Fordham scientists has found that plants that adapt to wild swings in precipitation still suffer adverse effects, including a reduction of seed production.

For the study, Elena Hamann, Ph.D., a biological sciences post-doctoral researcher, and Steven Franks, Ph.D., professor of biological sciences, harvested seeds from two collections of Brassica rapa plants in Orange County, California, that had experienced two decades of dramatic precipitation fluctuations, including increasingly severe droughts.

Hamann then grew four generations of plants in September 2016 under both drought and normal conditions in a greenhouse at the Calder Biological Field Station in Armonk, New York, and compared how the two different sets fared.

Franks had confirmed the ability of Brassica rapa to evolve rapidly in earlier studies, but this study took it one step further: The plants that had evolved to cope with drought by doing things like flowering earlier in the growing season, then had evolved to cope with heavy rainfall, then had evolved again to cope with more drought, showed signs that the constant changes were taking a toll.

“In the long term, the droughts are becoming more and more severe, and we’ve also seen that in more recent generations, the plants are not able to maintain fitness as well, so they produce less seeds,” said Hamann, who was the study’s principal investigator.

“So, we think that even though they adapt to drought by advancing flowering time and changing other specific traits, they are starting to suffer from the severity of drought. What they’re doing is basically not enough anymore.”

One of the most significant findings of the study is that paradoxically, rainy seasons actually hurt the plants’ ability to evolve in ways to cope with drought.

“After just two wet years, they flowered much later, but then there was another severe drought, so they then had to sort of evolve into earlier flowering again,” said Franks.

“But there’s a delay and they have less fitness, and produce fewer seeds. So they get fewer seeds into the seed bank for the next generation.”

The ability of a plant like Brassica rapa, which is closely related to turnips and bok choy, to weather droughts and rainy spells is important because wild swings in precipitation are the result of climate change that is likely to continue. In the area of California where Hamann and Franks harvested the plants, for instance, the most severe level of drought in 100 years happened only once between 1977 and 2004. But since then, the area has experienced several droughts that are equally severe or worse.

“The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that climate is changing even more than we thought,” said Franks.

“We’re seeing all these really substantial changes in this California system. Plant populations are responding, but there’s good evidence from this study that they may not be able to keep up with the severity of these changes.”

The results of the study, Two decades of evolutionary changes in Brassica rapa in response to fluctuations in precipitation and severe drought, was published this month in the journal Evolution.

“It’s up to us to train everybody about ecology, it doesn’t have to be to understand research protocols like you [biologists]do, but just share your experiences out in the field,” said Schuler, who is director of the botanical garden’s Thain Family Forest.

Nevertheless, Schuler said that in addition to sharing anecdotes with the general public, further engaging them through research holds the potential to transform the science and deepen awareness.

At the Thain Family Forest, volunteers have helped monitor and restore the forest, planting more than 34,000 native species. Tracking invasive species, as well as natives, involved measuring everything in the 50-acre forest that had grown a meter or higher, Schuler said. It was a herculean task that would’ve overwhelmed Schuler and her fulltime staff of two. But since 2008, NYBG engaged hundreds of students and volunteers—citizen scientists—to obtain data sets that helped map out that forest restoration.

Schuler said volunteers in the citizen science program help to document the timing of events in the forest across the seasons, which can reveal important trends. Tracking a tree from when it flowers to when it produces fruit to when its leaves turn color in the fall can help produce a long-term data set that could provide indicators of global warming, for example. She stressed that the garden employs quality control to maintain “the validity of data science, in terms of phenology.”

“Once you get in there to establish these programs, they run and run well,” she said, adding that seasoned volunteers can train others. Plus, practicing science as a volunteer fosters awareness, she said.

Tom Daniels, Ph.D., director of the Calder Center, agreed. “We need a more scientifically literate society and citizen scientists are the way to go,” he said.

20 Years of Undergraduate Research

For the past 20 years, Calder’s Undergraduate Research Program has allowed Fordham students to become citizen scientists themselves as they delved deep into the forests, rivers, lakes, city streets, and labs, in search of answers to research questions. This anniversary year was no different. Ten students took a data-driven look at the metropolitan region’s ecology this summer through a variety of experiments. From tying the roots of pediatric asthma in the Bronx to traffic data, to examining the effects of urbanization on blood glucose in pigeons, to observing seasonal patterns of photosynthesis on American beachgrass, the day’s subjects were as diverse as the city itself.

Engaging High School Students

Though the primary focus of the symposium was on the hard work conducted by undergraduates, this year a group of budding high school scientists were at the symposium to show the results of their Calder Center research for the first time. Their work underscored the focus of Schuler’s talk.

“Think globally; act locally,” she said. “Connecting students to nature teaches them that their data can make a difference and change policy.”

The idea to invite New York City high school students to participate in the Calder-sponsored program came from Patricio Meneses, Ph.D., associate professor of biology. After a meeting in May with Chief Diversity Officer Rafael Zapata, Meneses ran into Renaldo Alba on campus. Alba is the associate director of the University’s CSTEP/STEP program, which prepares minority students for careers in science, engineering, technology, and licensed professions. Within hours, Meneses secured financial sponsorship from Zapata’s office and recruited talented high school students from Alba’s program.

“We wanted to make sure the students would be paid for their research, so they didn’t have to take another summer job,” he said.

By June, selected student began hearing about their internships. That month, Meneses also recruited professors from chemistry, biology, and psychology. Work began in earnest in early July.

Kelechi D. Nnaji, a senior at Mount Vernon High School, researched how plants can be natural filters for polluted water. He’s been in the STEP program since seventh grade. The sumertime program brings students in grades 7 through 12 to Fordham for five weeks of college prep classes. He said the program familiarized him with the college campuses and helped him mature a bit faster than some of his peers.

“I’ve essentially experienced college life and even though I don’t go to the best school I do get excellent grades and I do really great things,” he said. “This is like my millionth time on campus.”

For Joshleen Cruzado, a senior at Young Women’s Leadership School in East Harlem, the program presented a rare opportunity.

“I’ve done research before but it was a retrospective, because the data was already there, but now I’m ready to do data myself,” she said beaming before her poster analyzing proteins of the HPV virus. “For women and minorities like me, we don’t get the opportunities to do these things, but because of this program we got that opportunity.”

This simple observation, a team of researchers led by Fordham scientists has learned, is applicable in cities as diverse as Vancouver, Canada; New York City; New Orleans; and Salvador, Brazil. And it has implications for both how rats evolve and how we learn to cope with their presence in our midst.

In Urban rat races: spatial population genomics of brown rats (Rattus norvegicus) compared across multiple cities, a paper published last month in the Royal Society’s flagship journal Proceedings B, Fordham doctoral candidate Matthew Combs showed how genetic analysis of rats collected by teams in those four cities reveal the ways in which evolution is repeating itself in cities, thanks in part to the geographical features of urban areas.

Working under the direction of Jason Munshi-South, Ph.D., associate professor of biological sciences, Combs collaborated with researchers working in the three other cities who brought rat tissue samples they’d collected as part of separate projects to Fordham’s Louis Calder Center for analysis.

Same Species, But Subtle Differences

At least 150 rats were sampled from each city, and when researchers analyzed the results, they discovered that just as brown rats in Lower Manhattan have evolved to be distinct from their uptown brethren, (a discovery detailed in a 2017 paper) rats in those three cities differ from each other in discernable ways.

In Manhattan, the culprit is Midtown, with its relative paucity of shelter and food sources; in New Orleans, it’s the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, which divides the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood from the rest of the city. In both Vancouver and Salvador, major roadways were found to split disparate populations of brown rats.

Combs said previous studies had compared rats around the world, but none had incorporated such a robust number of specimens.

“In this case, we used hundreds of samples within each city to look at some very fine scale movements, and were able to get quite a bit more detail about these four cities, and ask questions about how the same types of landscape features were creating unrelated groups,” he said.

Munshi-South, whose lab has tracked the movement of rats around the world, said he was surprised that the level of differences among the rats was similar in all four cities, given that two are in temperate climates, one is sub-tropical, and one is tropical. All, however, are coastal cities located in the Americas, and are thus a “biological legacy of colonialism and migration.”

“They have a very similar level of genetic diversity in the rat population, and that may indicate a shared ecological and evolutionary history. These rats were likely introduced to these cities around the same time, and have been there for about the same amount of time,” Munshi-South said.

“Rats are really a reflection of human history. They don’t obviously have a recorded history that’s very good, but the genetics reveal a lot about how we move them around.”

Potential for Understanding Disease

Combs said the collaboration with the teams in the other three cities—some of whom were working on projects disease-related projects—was also noteworthy, because the technique the Fordham team uses to track genetic variations in species can be shared and used for other objectives as well.

“We can tell them about some of these genetic patterns, and they can tell us about disease dynamics and distribution, and hopefully we can put those two pieces of information together and start to understand how the movement of rats and the genetic patterns relate to the movement of disease, which is really what everyone’s worried about,” he said.

“I think there’s a lot of potential there.”

Munshi-South agreed, saying this study is a model for future ones in cities across the globe. The days of studying a single species in a single city are over, he said.

“One of the big hypotheses that’s out there is that urbanization drives the same ecological and evolutionary results over and over again,” he said.

“We’re trying to confirm that with these kinds of studies.”