At the Louis Calder Center, scientists explore ecological mysteries and study society’s impact on the natural world.

To the casual observer, Fordham’s Louis Calder Center might seem to be just another quiet tract of Hudson River Valley forest. But for natural scientists, it abounds with opportunity. Explore the 113-acre biological field station in Armonk, New York, and you’ll find a bounty of ecosystems and animals, from the four-legged to the microscopic. At the heart of the preserve is a 10-acre temperate lake teeming with a diversity of aquatic life. Go high enough and, way off in the distance, you can see another big player in the preserve’s ecology: New York City, which begins only 16 miles away.

Its proximity has never been more relevant. “Humans and our cities are the most dominant forces of contemporary evolution now,” says Jason Munshi-South, Ph.D., a Calder-based biology professor who recently co-authored a paper in the journal Science on how species are evolving within cities. Other scientists at Calder study invasive species that arrive via big-city commerce. And they tackle many other mysteries: why some animals survive new threats while others don’t, how nutrients flow beneath the soil, or how insects transmit disease.

The center was born 50 years ago when the land was given to Fordham by the Louis Calder Foundation, named for the paper and pulp magnate who maintained a summer home on the property. Today, that home is Calder Hall, one of several buildings in which students and professors analyze DNA samples, inspect plant and animal specimens, hold classes, and generate knowledge.

Among many other public services, the Calder Center supports the nation’s longest-running study of ticks and Lyme disease, and its scientists work to illuminate society’s impact on nature at a time of growing concern about biodiversity and climate change.

It is also a crucial training ground: “The most important thing we do here is make scientists,” says Thomas Daniels, Ph.D., an expert in tick- and mosquito-borne diseases who has served as the center’s director since 2014.

On a sparkling autumn day late last October, FORDHAM magazine tagged along as undergraduates, graduate students, professors, and visiting scientists went about their work—gently probing, collecting samples, and explaining the science behind their work and its potential impact.

Evolution in the Big City

In recent years, Fordham biologist Jason Munshi-South, Ph.D., and his team of graduate and undergraduate students have become known for their studies of urban wildlife and pest species, most notably rats.

“The initial idea was to understand what a New York City rat is, from all ecological and evolutionary angles,” he says of one project, which grew to a global scale and has public health implications. “We’re using DNA to understand how they move around the city and how they’re related to other rat populations.”

In a first-floor lab in Calder Hall, doctoral student Carol Henger uses similar methods to study coyotes, animals that only recently moved into the city for the first time, Munshi-South says. She’s looking at DNA markers from coyote scat collected in Pelham Bay Park and elsewhere to infer how individual coyotes are related, what they’re eating, and how they’re dispersing.

Meanwhile, Nicole Fusco, another doctoral student in Munshi-South’s lab, sequences DNA to study gene flow among populations of salamanders.

Biodiversity and Climate Change

In the Calder Center’s Lord & Burnham greenhouse, constructed on the property nearly a century ago, doctoral student Stephen Kutos has been growing pairs of potted trees and studying how they pass water and nutrients back and forth via subsoil networks of fungus.

“Tree stumps have been found that are still alive hundreds of years after the tree was cut down, quite possibly because surrounding trees send them nutrients,” he says. With further study, he adds, it may be possible to restore the wild population of one type of tree he’s growing, the American chestnut, which was eradicated from the wild 100 years ago by blight.

Restoring the tree could help combat climate change, scientists believe, because the American chestnut can absorb and store carbon quickly.

In an adjacent greenhouse, several researchers work on an evolutionary study initiated by Fordham biologist Steven Franks, Ph.D., and focused on Brassica rapa (field mustard). As Franks demonstrated in an earlier study, the annual plant evolved earlier flowering within just five years to cope with drought conditions in California.

The Mystery of the Red-Backed Salamander’s Survival

Late in the morning, undergrads Dan Khieninson and Erin Carter and doctoral student Elle Barnes enter Calder forest in search of red-backed salamanders.

“You can find them anywhere in the forest as long as the soil’s moist,” Barnes says before the group navigates a steep decline to the forest floor.

She indicates several flat, weathered pieces of wood she’s left behind. “You’re more likely to find them under here.” The three researchers crouch down and soon locate several specimens.

They’re trying to discover why red-backed salamanders are not affected by the chytrid fungus that is devastating other amphibian populations.

“It’s not enough to just study the ones that are going extinct,” Barnes says. “There are solutions in the ones that will survive. What do they have that other amphibians are lacking?”

The answer lies in their microbiome, Barnes says. She, Carter, and Khieninson use cotton swabs on the salamanders’ bodies to collect samples of microorganisms that they can test against chytrid fungus in the lab. The impact of their research could extend beyond conservation biology, Barnes says: “The discoveries we make about disease and microbiomes can be applied to multiple systems, including humans’.”

A Closer Look at a Ubiquitious, Ecologically Valuable Species

Michael Kausch, a doctoral student in aquatic ecology, rows a boat out on Calder Lake to take some water samples he can later test for cyanobacteria at the lakefront McCarthy Laboratories. Meanwhile, inside the lab, his fellow doctoral student Stephen Gottschalk is working with their Fordham supervisor, John Wehr, Ph.D. Gottschalk is studying green algae in the Characeae family.

“They’re an important food source for birds, a habitat for insects, and they support fisheries,” he says.

So far Gottschalk has collected samples in nine U.S. states, and he’s been working at the New York Botanical Garden under the supervision of Kenneth Karol, Ph.D., to examine his samples on a molecular level.

He’s finding that what scientists once thought were just subtle differences among green algae are in fact ecologically important distinctions. “They’re designated as one species,” Gottschalk says, “but what it looks like to me so far is these are very regionally distinct.”

Mosquitoes, Ticks, and the Pathogens They Carry

Insect-borne diseases are a big part of the research focus at Routh House, the vector ecology lab at the Calder Center that’s jointly run by Fordham and the New York state health department. Inside the lab, scientists study samples of various species, such as the aggressive and potentially disease-carrying Asian tiger mosquito. Outside, they collect specimens and conduct surveillance projects.

“We set up mosquito traps all around the lower Hudson Valley,” says Marly Katz, a state employee and Fordham doctoral student. “All the mosquitoes end up here, where I identify them, and then we send a bunch [to the state health department]for disease testing.” She and her colleagues are also collaborating with Columbia University scientists to “map the Asian tiger mosquito,” she says, and determine if changes in climate are affecting its migration patterns.

While Katz checks a mosquito trap, research technician Richard Rizzitello collects ticks by dragging a white cloth across the ground and then pulling them off with forceps (he uses a lint roller to collect any larvae).

One Calder scientist, Nicholas Piedmonte, displays egg-to-adult samples of the blacklegged tick, which can carry the bacterium that causes Lyme disease.

“These are great for education and outreach,” he says, particularly in central New York, “where ticks are kind of a new problem.”

View a timeline of the Calder Center’s history. And watch a July 2017 video celebrating the center’s recent golden anniversary.

The students were selected from more than 350 applicants to join the first cohort of Project TRUE (Teens Researching Urban Ecology), a collaboration between Fordham and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). The project aims to grow interest in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) careers among historically underrepresented populations.

The program is part of a five-year study led by Fordham and WCS to test the effectiveness of tiered mentoring in helping students get accepted into college and find careers in STEM fields. The study, which is funded by a $2.6 million National Science Foundation grant, connects New York City high school students with Fordham biologists, graduate and undergraduate students, and WCS educators.

If successful, the program could ultimately be scaled up and implemented nationwide, said Amy Tuininga, PhD, Fordham’s principal investigator for Project TRUE.

“Mentoring gives you the power to offer real research experience to a greater number of students,” said Tuininga, an associate professor of biology. “I couldn’t mentor all of these students in my lab, but I could mentor one or two graduate students, who then go on to mentor more students.”

Students conducted research at four New York City zoos—Bronx Zoo, Queens Zoo, Prospect Park Zoo, and Central Park Zoo. Each of the four teams included a Fordham graduate student and a WCS instructor as the project leaders; four undergraduate students; and between eight and 12 high school students.

One of the more striking outcomes of having a tiered mentorship structure, said WCS instructor Lily Mleczko, was how effectively the students communicated with one another, despite differences in age and education.

“I graduated from high school 13 years ago, so I’m a lot farther removed from that experience than the undergraduates. They were an essential step to simplifying and explaining scientific concepts and research methods to the high school students,” Mleczko said.

“And it didn’t stop at the science—the undergraduates would talk to them about what it’s like to be in college and about different resources at Fordham, like the CSTEP program.”

That mentoring relationship is, in fact, at the crux of Project TRUE, said Karen Tingley, director of Zoo and Aquarium Programs and Business Development for the WCS Education Department.

“The undergraduate students are an important part of the equation. Rather than having someone at the ripe old age of 30 mentoring the high school students, they have the undergrads to look at and think, ‘This person is 19 years old and is doing all of this. I can do this too,’” Tingley said.

The mentorship doesn’t stop after the research ends, however. The students will reconvene in the fall for a two-day college boot camp that offers instruction and guidance on the college application process. Over the next four years, the team will maintain contact with the students, both to inform them of internships and research opportunities and to measure their progress in college.

If successful, Project TRUE will have helped 200 New York City high school students gain entrance to the STEM fields by the end of the five-year study.

“The goal is for them to see that there’s a world of career opportunities out there and that these opportunities are for them, too—not just others,” Tingley said. “That’s why we wanted to have the program happen in this space—at Fordham—so that they can see that they, too, belong here in college.

“It’s a matter of showing them that there are opportunities out there for them, and their opinions and their voices matter.”

Thomas Berry: Selected Writings on the Earth Community

When Thomas Berry died in 2009 at the age of 94, The New York Times called “his influential writings … an early call to humanity to save nature in order to save itself.” In this collection of his work, Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, the founding co-directors of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, pay tribute to their former Fordham mentor, who “reshaped our thinking about human-Earth relations” and “awakened religious sensibilities to the environmental crisis.”

A Catholic priest, Father Berry taught at the University from 1966 to 1979 and was an “anomaly in Fordham’s theology department,” Tucker and Grim write, because he “was neither a Jesuit, nor a theologian.” He established a graduate program in the history of the world’s religions and later called himself a “geologian,” a portmanteau that describes his focus on relating humanity’s spiritual and cultural evolution to the natural history of Earth and the universe. Humankind, he believed, is poised at an evolutionary “moment of grace,” ready to shift its view of its place in the universe. “The Great Work now,” he wrote, is to carry out “the transition from a period of human devastation of Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.” His urgent, hopeful message has never been more timely.

Growing up in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside of metropolitan Washington D.C., Marc Conte, Ph.D., grabbed every chance he could to be outdoors. His love of nature eventually led him to study ecology and economics at Dartmouth College. While he held equal interest in the two fields, a 13-week program to study ecology in Costa Rica and Jamaica convinced him that the pervasive impact of human behavior on natural systems called for active management of those systems,.

“We were in these incredibly diverse ecological systems to study coral reef and tropical forest ecology, but I was most struck by was how human activity affected these systems.” he said. What most interested him, he decided, was how humans respond to incentives that lead to either exploitation or conservation of the natural world.

Conte found a federally funded program supporting interdisciplinary study in economics and natural science at the University of California-Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management. There, he burrowed deeper into his chosen subjects and honed his research to focus on environmental public goods and the extent to which markets and policies could support them. He focused on the mapping and valuation of ecosystem services, as a post-doctoral research fellow at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment

“One of my research interests is in exploring the extent to which policy intervention and voluntary actions, such as charitable giving, are able to provide adequate levels of things like clean air and water, and parks,” he said. One of Conte’s current research projects looks at social information and charitable giving and another project studies the impact of disaster relief on learning about hurricane damages.

His paper currently under review, “Perceived Image, Target Generosity Level, and Voluntary Public Good Provision: Evidence from a Field Experiment,” may have implications beyond the environmental concerns. It closely examines the mechanisms behind the manner in which donors give.

For this experiment, Conte had the cooperation of a conservation group that made a mailing list of nearly 50,000 members available for the project.

Conte sought to determine whether providing donors with “social information” would affect the amount of money they gave. A control group of potential donors were merely asked to donate $300, while a treatment group of donors were encouraged with the phrase “join the top 10 percent of givers by donating $300.”

When given the “top 10 percent” phrase, donors who historically gave less than $300 to the organization split into two patterns of behavior: Donors who lacked an established relationship with the organization decreased their contribution amount, while donors with long-term relationships increased their donations.

“”There are two different motivators as to why these people are giving,” said Conte. “One motivation is the desire to be viewed as generous, relative to the rest of the organization’s members, and the other motivation is to ensure that this organization, which has earned the member’s trust, has the resources it needs to achieve its goals.”

“Economic thinking about what determines behavior—be it social norms and/or image concerns—is becoming more sophisticated,” said Conte. “I wanted to conduct this research to see how information about other people’s behaviors might affect individual giving, as charities’ budget concerns are making voluntary contributions essential.

In the disaster relief project, Conte has worked with David Kelly from the University of Miami to measure one’s adaptation to climate change. In a theoretical model of homeowner behavior, Conte and Kelly find that coastal homeowners who receive disaster relief, such as that provided by FEMA in the wake of catastrophic hurricanes, reduce their purchase of insurance coverage. This outcome has two undesirable effects. First, the assistance provided by FEMA is a transfer from inland to coastal residents, essentially subsidizing the purchase of coastal property. Second, government support reduces the financial liabilities of homeowners and insurance firms, leaving them less prepared for future storms.

This outcome is especially problematic as the researchers find that damages from large hurricanes in the United States (Category 3 and stronger) seem to be increasing through time, possibly due to climate change.

Conte said that the policy of disaster relief, which is intended to reduce the burden of hurricane damages on coastal homeowners, unintentionally reduces the ability of these homeowners to learn about the risk that they face from future storms. This, in turn, increases the potential costs of future catastrophic storms.

“Natural and economic systems are individually quite complex. Developing effective policies in areas of the environment, ones which have the potential to increase social welfare through fostering more constructive relationships with that environment, requires a sound understanding of the interplay between these nuanced systems,” he said.