Nathan Gregory's First Email from Kenya
February 8, 2006


Dear Dan (Professor Rubenstein)

Sorry that it has taken me a few days to send you an update, but there have been very few minutes during the day to write emails. So far, the course is going very well, and the students seem to be enjoying themselves. All are curious about every aspect of the system. More importantly, the group has great chemistry, and they are a joy to be around.

The campsite is very nice, and all of the students are happy with their tents, the showers, etc. Nick Georgiadis and I changed the daily schedule so that we spend the morning doing some type of field activity before attending lecture at 10:30. The students have about 1 and 1/2 to 2 hours after lunch to read, write emails, and enter data before an afternoon field activity. On Monday, we spent the afternoon distance sampling dik-diks on Mpala and began to look at that data yesterday.

Yesterday morning I took the students on a bird walk along the river, and we did a habitat assessment exercise on El Karama yesterday afternoon. So far, Nick Georgiadis has covered the factors influencing the distribution of savannas in Africa and the ecology and conservation challenges of the Ewaso Ecosystem. He has also lectured on estimating population abundance and experimental design and alternatives to the null hypothesis. Today he will be lecturing on dung and herbivore dynamics and other bottom-up processes. We went to the black cotton this morning to see the KLEE plots and talk about ants.

Nathan


Go to the next page..... Professor Dan Rubenstein's Email from March 6, 2006

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