Janis Dickinson's Lab

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Welcome - Dickinson Lab

Janis L. Dickinson, Professor, Natural Resources, Arthur A. Allen Director of Citizen Science, Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology

Member of Graduate Fields:

Natural Resources & Neurobiology and Behavior

I am sorry - my lab is currently full!

I will be on sabbatical at Stanford and Hastings Reserve in 2011-2012, but I will be back in fall of 2012.

I accept students through two graduate fields: M.S./Ph.D. students in Natural Resources and Ph.D. students in the field of Neurobiology and Behavior (Animal Behavior).

 

History

I have been a faculty member in Natural Resources and Director of Citizen Science at Cornell Lab of Ornithology since fall of 2005. In Citizen Science, we are developing research models that involve a blend of citizen research participation over a broad spatial scale with studies to understand the potential for the internet to create conservation communities by providing support for human cooperation, particularly with regard to issues of sustainability and conservation of biodiversity. These activities coincide with my historic interests in cooperative breeding and other forms of social behavior at both proximate and ultimate levels of analysis and expand on these interests to include integration of such broad topics as existential- environmental psychology, social networking, and collective action theory. This breadth of interests requires involvement of a diverse team of researchers, graduate students, and undergraduates. Our ecological work focuses on anthropogenic change and its consequences for biodiversity. We emphasize behavioral variation, landscape change, spatial genetics, and climate change. Citizen science projects in my program include NestWatch, a national database for collecting new and historic nesting observations for North American birds, The YardMap Network, a project that uses citizen science and social networking to engage participants in learning about, practicing, and inventing new sustainable practices in residential landscapes, Project FeederWatch, which we used to study range limits for wintering birds, and Celebrate Urban Birds, which focuses on bringing nature and science to urban, underserved audiences.

In the years from 1987-2005 I held a graduated series of positions in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley, as an off-site researcher living at Hastings Natural History Reserve in the remote reaches of Carmel Valley, CA.  My ongoing research program at Hastings Reserve involves using a long-term study of color-banded western bluebirds as a model system for testing key hypotheses regarding the evolution of mating systems, sex ratio, dispersal behavior, cooperative breeding, migration, and life history traits.  At Hastings Reserve, mistletoe grows on deciduous oaks and produces a sustained berry crop over the winter. It appears to be a form of wealth that drives family group living. Although sons typically winter on their natal territories with their parents and sometimes become nonbreeding helpers, reducing mistletoe wealth by half causes sons to leave home.  Currently, the western bluebird project is directed at understanding bluebird-mistletoe interactions and testing the relative importance of territory quality and nepotism for keeping sons at home.  This work incorporates field experiments and combines demographic analysis with GIS landscape modeling.

 

Trained as an entomologist, I have also studied insect mating systems within the context of multi-male mating and sperm competition.

Curriculum Vitae - click here for ...

Publications - click here for ...

Media Links

• Nature Podcast on Personality Profiles - http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/v442/n7105/
  nature-2006-08-24.mp3
• BBC “The Rules of Life” with Aubrey Manning, Programme 5 “Happy Families” - http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/
  science/rulesoflife.shtml
• National Geographic News - http://news.nationalgeographic.com/
• Great Backyard Bird Count - Http://www.npr.org/templates/story/
  story.php?storyId=5221793
• Cornell - http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/April06/
  LabTaskForce.ksr.html