S t e p h a n i e ..E b y
Ph.D. Graduate Student

Academic advisor: Mark Ritchie

Email: sleby@syr.edu
Telephone: 315-443-1693
Office Location: 803 BRL

EDUCATION:
B.S., Bates College

FUNDING & AWARDS:
SU Graduate Fellowship
Teaching Assistantship
Sigma Xi Grant-in-Aid of Research
Syracuse University Creative Project Grant

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Conservation, Behavior, and Ecosystem Interactions

CURRENT RESEARCH

Fire is an important factor in the ecology and evolution of grassland ecosystems as it helps determine the critical balance of grass and trees and thus habitat for many wildlife species. Fire has occurred for millennia in African grasslands due to seasonal dry periods that lead to natural fires caused by lightning storms. This has resulted in the evolution of fire-resistant communities of plants and animals that are dependent on periodic burning for their existence. Today fire is accepted as a valuable tool for the management of grassland vegetation and is used extensively throughout protected areas in Africa.

Previous studies have found that herbivores are attracted to burned areas and will move away from other resources in order to utilize them. This attraction has only been documented for a short time period post-burning and no studies have looked at the changes in this attraction with increased time post-burn. Several hypotheses have been proposed for this preference, but little to no work has been done testing their validity. The hypotheses proposed are that ungulates visit burned areas to:

(1) Eat the nutrient rich post burn re-growth
(2) Eat ash as a nutrient supplement
(3) Avoid parasites
(4) Be safer from predators

The last hypothesis has interesting implications for carnivores and is supported by the fact that burning causes a reduction in vegetation height and both lions and cheetahs hunt more often in high vegetation. However, no work has been done studying the effects of fire on carnivores. Preliminary work using long-term lion datasets and fire maps suggests that lions avoid burned areas. Therefore, I hypothesize that carnivores in general avoid burned areas.

For my Ph.D. research I am testing the above four hypotheses for why herbivores are attracted to burned areas, exploring how herbivore attraction to burned areas changes with time post-burning, and studying the effects of burning on carnivore habitat choice.

My research is being conducted in Serengeti National Park, a 14,000 km^2 protected area in northwestern Tanzania, East Africa, one of the world’s last great natural ecosystems. The Serengeti features large and diverse populations of both mammalian herbivores and carnivores and the park management actively sets fires to manage vegetation.
These features make the Serengeti an ideal place to
conduct my work.

PUBLICATIONS

Anderson, T.M., M.E. Ritchie, E. Mayemba, S. Eby, J.B. Grace, and S.J. McNaughton. 2007. Forage Nutritive Quality in the Serengeti Ecosystem: The Roles of Fire and Herbivory. Am. Nat. 170:343-357.

Dempewolf, J., S. Trigg, R.S. DeFries, and S. Eby. 2007. MODIS Derived Burned Area Mapping of the Serengeti-Mara Region. IEEE. Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters.

O'Steen, S., S. Eby, and J. Bunce. 2001. Sex, speed and survival: do courtship locomotor skills predict skills when escaping predators? Am. Zool. 41.

Bunce, J., S. Eby, and S. O'Steen. 2001. Does c-start performance predict survival of prey encountering predators? Am. Zool. 41:1401.