News and Notes

Board of Directors Nominations

2006 Nominations Committee:

John Marzluff (chair), Walter Koeing, and Vicki Saab.

The following five people (in alphabetical order) have agreed to be nominated for the Cooper Ornithological Society (COS) Board of Directors, to serve from 2007–2010.

Carol L. Chambers is an Associate Professor in the School of Forestry at Northern Arizona University. She has a B.S. (Biology) and M.S. (Forestry) from the University of Kentucky, and a Ph.D. (Wildlife Sciences) from Oregon State University. Dr. Chambers teaches concepts of wildlife ecology and management, with a focus on wildlife habitat, to undergraduate, graduate, and resource professionals, through university courses and continuing education workshops. Her research interests examine species and community responses to natural and anthropogenic disturbances, such as forest management and wildfire. Although she spends more time working in forested ecosystems, she is also interested in habitat use of nonforested ecosystems. Her work with birds includes habitat relationships (use of macrohabitat such as vegetation type and use of microhabitat such as mistletoe, snags, and water sources), response to forest management treatments (restoration, green-tree retention, and other alternatives to clearcutting), response to wildfire, reintroduction experiments, and snag dynamics. Dr. Chambers has published 40 articles as refereed publications, book chapters, and conference proceedings, and has given >50 reports, workshops, or presentations on research results. She has been a COS member since 1990.

Sheldon J. Cooper is an Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. He holds a B.S. from Northern State University, an M.A. from the University of South Dakota, and a Ph.D. from Utah State University. He has published several articles including six papers in The Condor. During the past three years, Dr. Cooper has been the Chair of the COS Student Membership Committee; in this position he is responsible for advising the COS officers and Board of Directors on graduate student applicants for free two-year membership in the COS. He has also served on the AOU Student Awards Committee. He has been a member of the COS since 1992 and has attended several Cooper Ornithological Society annual meetings and every North American Ornithological Conference. Dr. Cooper's interests are in thermoregulation and ecological energetics of songbirds, particularly chickadees and titmice. He believes that the Cooper Ornithological Society is the leading society providing information on the ecological physiology of birds.

Janis L. Dickinson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Natural Resources at Cornell University and the Arthur A. Allen Director of Citizen Science at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. She holds a B.S. in Biology from Binghamton University (State University of New York) and a Ph.D. in entomology and animal behavior from Cornell University. From 1987 to 2005, Dr. Dickinson was a research ecologist with the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at University of California, Berkeley stationed at the Hastings Natural History Reservation in Carmel Valley, California. Her work on Western Bluebirds (Sialia mexicana) at Hastings involved collecting long-term demographic data and conducting field experiments, both within a hypothesis-testing context. Initially, the primary focus of the bluebird project was fitness consequences of behaviors like cooperative breeding and delayed dispersal, as well as the decision rules animals use to determine allocation to mate-guarding, offspring gender, and parental care. In recent years, the focus has shifted to winter ecology and has involved experimental demonstration of the importance of resources (mistletoe) for natal dispersal decisions and winter survival. This work suggests that mistletoe is a key winter resource and has broad-ranging implications for Western Bluebird conservation in California's oak woodlands. A fellow of the AOU, Dr. Dickinson has been active in the International Society for Behavioral Ecology (councilor) and The Animal Behavior Society (Chair of the Membership Committee). As Director of the Citizen Science Program at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, Dr. Dickinson works in various capacities to use citizen science as a tool for public engagement in adaptive management, continental-scale research and monitoring, and education, particularly in human-dominated landscapes.

Matthias Leu is a Scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey Snake River Field Station in Boise and a Faculty Affiliate at Boise State University and the University of Washington. He holds a B.S. in zoology from the University of Washington, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Washington in wildlife ecology. As a post-doctoral fellow he studied nest predator responses to anthropogenic disturbance patterns with John Marzluff, and as a National Research Council post-doctoral fellow he studied the influence of multiscale land cover changes on avian diversity in the Intermountain West with Steve Knick. Dr. Leu has published in Biological Conservation, The Auk, The Condor, and American Naturalist. He has been very active in the Cooper Ornithological Society, serving as Chairman of the Student Participation Committee from 2003 to 2006, including the NAOC meetings in Veracruz, and as the Chair of the Student Presentation Awards during 2004 and 2005. In 2004 he co-organized a symposium on shrubsteppe habitat and avian conservation for the annual meeting of the Cooper Ornithological Society. He is an Elected Member of the American Ornithologists' Union and his passion lies in bird conservation, studying factors influencing population regulation both on the breeding and wintering grounds and across large-scale anthropogenic disturbance patterns. Dr. Leu views the Cooper Ornithological Society as the leader in bringing basic and applied avian ecologists into productive science-based forums.

Mark D. Reynolds is a Senior Ecologist for the California Chapter of The Nature Conservancy, a position he has held since 2000. In this capacity, he advises TNC's work in the California North Coast and Klamath ecoregions. Dr. Reynolds has worked in field science and conservation in California for over 20 years, most recently as the Executive Director of Field Station Programs at San Diego State University. Prior to that, he worked for the University of California's Natural Reserve System as co-Director of the Sedgwick Reserve near Santa Barbara, and as co-Manager of Sagehen Creek Field Station for University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Reynolds has a B.A. in biology from the University of Iowa, an M.S. from Idaho State University, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include behavior, ecology, and conservation biology of birds. He is the author of the Birds of North America account for the Yellow-billed Magpie (Pica nuttalli). He is an adjunct professor of biology at San Francisco State University with ongoing research projects on bird conservation in California. He currently serves on several science advisory boards. Dr. Reynolds is keenly interested in the application of science to conservation and views the Cooper Ornithological Society as the leading ornithological society providing information essential to bird conservation.