Despite recent negative press lately about the budget problems at the University of Massachusetts, there are positive things to report taking place around campus. One piece of exciting news is that Department of Natural Resources adjunct professor Rebecca Field has been awarded a Fulbright grant.
The United States Department of State, and the J. William Fulbright Scholarship Board announced recently that Field was awarded the grant to lecture and study in Costa Rica.
Field will be in the Central American country during the months of February and March to conduct an intensive field ecology course on wildlife-habitat relationships in tropical forests. The course will be for graduate students from the National University of Costa Rica and from the five-university Latin American Studies Consortium of New England.
An avid bird lover, Field has studied many birds throughout the world in many different habitats. She has focused on old growth forest requirements for endangered woodpeckers; the effects of hunting regulations on the mourning dove population; and bird-habitat association in old development areas in northern Alaska.
Field has led studies of the endangered Puerto Rican parrot; habitat and courtship of black ducks and mallards; and habitat selection of the American woodcock.
She has also directed a training program for natural resources professionals from other countries, especially those in Central America and Central Europe, over the past decade.
Currently, she is focusing on the ecology and management of wildlife in suburban habitats, as well as collaborating with a mammalian ecologist in a study of small mammal predation of open-nesting birds in mixed-oak forests.
Field has published several articles on wildlife-habitat associations and behavior relevant to wildlife management.
She is one of approximately 2,000 U.S. grant recipients who will travel and study abroad during the 2001-2002 academic year through the Fulbright program.
The Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright established the Fulbright program in 1946 in order to build mutual understanding between the people of the US and the rest of the world. It is sponsored by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State.
