Program areas at Craighead Beringia South
NEW WEBSITE and SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGIES: This year CBS updated the entire Beringia website. Our goal was to create an engaging site that would encourage visitors to dive deeper into the site and keep coming back for more information. The site was redesigned with a focus on search engine optimization (SEO) and an improved user interface (UI) experience. By improving the website, we also added several new components. These included a news section sharing local ecology information, a section for "notes from the fieldX and a phenology section with blog posts by Derek Craighead. This year we also implemented new social media (SM) strategies to connect with the Jackson community. These strategies included partnering with other Instagram accounts, imporving the SEO across our SM, and establishing regular posts (focusing mostly on Instagram). The Beringia Instagram account has gained followers and more people are sharing and engaging with the contect across both Instagram and Facebook platforms.
MEADOW ROAD BIOTIC INVENTORY: A project with the goal of identifying all mammals, birds, and amphibians and their relative abundance and seasonal use patterns on property south of Moose, WY. In addition, we documented nesting raptors to supplement our historic dataset and tracked American Kestrals. A final report on this project has been issued in 2021. CBS has retained all of the collected camera trapping data and may use it for any future research purposes.
NON-INVASIVE MONITORING PROJECT: Peter Alexander wrote an interactive computer application to match species based on photo-ID. He is continuing to develop a version where a user can input any collection of photos to build a capture history or 'clean-up' a capture history that a machine learning algorithm may have put together with inconsistencies. Ecology and Evolution has accepted a manuscript from us. The paper is a general 'proof of concept' of the idea. It covers the effectiveness of our novel camera trap design and the improvement in human ability to individually identify pumas in photos.
JCC ARCHIVE: John C. Craighead and his brother Frank were legendary in the field of wildlife biology. Throughout their pioneering careers, they collected images and video in addition to their professional publications. The Archival Project is an effort to disseminate their professional work and digitize the images and video collected during their careers.
EAGLE: Our 2021 research focused on impacts of non-lead ammunition distribution programs in offsetting eagle deaths and documenting Golden Eagle habitats in Livingston, MT and Teton County, WY.