What are you hoping to learn from this project?
One of the things I think about a lot is why forests are changing, how they’re changing, and what does that mean for the future of forests and the ecosystems they support? Here in Central New York and many places across the Northeast, forests are dealing with overabundant deer herds.
One of the big experimental tools that ecologists use is a deer exclosure, a big fence that keeps deer out. What’s interesting is that in these exclosure studies, sometimes forests recover and sometimes they don’t. What I’ve been wondering about, that could be a missing piece of the puzzle is close to my own heart – the rodents that we study. When a deer comes through and eats much of the understory, that means there’s not a lot of habitat left for smaller animals like rodents. We want to know if experimental deer removal leads to a change in the number and diversity of native rodents.
The other interesting wrinkle, which I always tell my students, is that rodents aren’t stupid. They know that a fence is keeping out other things besides deer, like larger predators. What we’re proposing to do is disentangle the deer removal and predator removal to better understand why some forests show different responses when you put up a deer exclosure.
I’m also excited to work with Professor Andrea Townsend on disease ecology measurements to see where you remove deer but add back in predators, if that affects Lyme disease transmission as predators play an important role in regulating disease transmission and rodents are reservoirs of disease.
How will this grant benefit Hamilton students?
Beyond extra research opportunities, one of the things that I’m really looking forward to is a workshop we’re setting up for students involved in the project for every summer of the three years the grant is active. We’re going to drive out to the Chicago area and stay at a field research station for a week to interact with people who have non-academic biology careers in the private and government sectors and to see what it’s like to work at a larger research institution like Northern Illinois University. Being exposed to the breadth of these different careers outside academics will be really beneficial to students as they think about what they could do with a biology degree from Hamilton. We’re also aiming to involve one of our upper-level biology labs to do more authentic research with this set of deer exclosures.
Everybody is connected to the forest in some way, directly or indirectly. [...] Being able to do research that helps us preserve this really critical thing that everybody relies on and to be able to share that with people is what I’m ultimately really excited about.
How will this project impact people beyond the Hill?
Everybody is connected to the forest in some way, directly or indirectly. Maybe you own a piece of forest in your backyard, maybe you go to the park, or maybe you just like breathing in clean air. Being able to do research that helps us preserve this really critical thing that everybody relies on and to be able to share that with people is what I’m ultimately really excited about.
We’ve reached out to the New York Department of Environmental Conservation and they’re very interested to know what we’re going to find. We’re going to work with them to develop language without scientific jargon that describes what we found and what that means for deer and forest management across the state.
Posted September 9, 2025
