Alejandra Echeverri, PhD

🌿 An honor to present at UC Berkeley's Wildlife Seminar where I talked about the use of AI + species distribution models to study agriculture's impacts on wildlife and One Health.

Thanks @ornithoale.bsky.social for hosting me!

#Wildlife #Tapirs #OneHealth #AIinConservation #UCBerkeley

Overall, a super fun experience and so lucky to work with my amazing collaborators: @ornithoale.bsky.social who inspired a lot of this work as well as @katherinelauck.bsky.social and Julian Tattoni who TAed the class and helped create this course-based research experience :)

Finally, larger, more attractive species were consistently more likely to be marketed.

This is despite prior work arguing that an emphasis on novel birds translates into dedicated birdwatchers preferring dull species.

Dedicated birdwatchers may value beauty in birds, just like everyone else.

Second, we were surprised that regularly observed species were more likely to be mentioned in trip itineraries.

Maybe tour operators are balancing novelty with the risk of disappointing clients when they inevitably fail to encounter rare species?

Ok, so what did we find?

First, tour operators recognized that birdwatchers value novelty above all else. Range-restricted species were ten times more likely to appear in trip itineraries than cosmopolitan species.

The most unique part: this was a multi-year class project! So fun to have undergrads help us collect the data, form their own questions, present posters, and then, eventually, have it turn into a published product!

(photos are example student posters)

Stoked to share our new paper, just out in @amornith.bsky.social, that explores the traits that predict which species that appear in Costa Rican bird itineraries!

(open access link below, thread to follow)

academic.oup.com/condor/advan...

New paper out today led by Prof. @dskarp.bsky.social

Marketing birds: The traits birdwatching tourism companies highlight in Costa Rican tour itineraries

An ancient pea holds lessons for a warming Himalaya Nurtured for millennia in the Trans-Himalaya, the hardy black pea outperforms cash crops in resilience and nutrition — and could reshape how science values farmers’ knowledge and forgotten foods.

Had a great interaction with Sahana Ghosh from Nature India about our black pea research. Here's her excellent story on our paper:
www.nature.com/articles/d44...
@nature.com
@ornithoale.bsky.social
@stanforddoerr.bsky.social

a man in a suit is crying in the rain . ALT: a man in a suit is crying in the rain .

the worst part of every manuscript for an ornithologist,

yes, worse than tough reviewers
worse even than outright rejection

when they typeset the paper and all the species names are lower case

The ecological promise of the Himalayan black pea Stanford researchers discovered a nearly forgotten variety of black peas from the northwest Himalayas that excels in climate resilience and nutrition.

Happy to share our research was featured in Stanford reports. @stanforddoerr.bsky.social @ornithoale.bsky.social
news.stanford.edu/stories/2025...

Happy to share our research on traditional farming landscapes in northwest Himalaya is out in Science Advances! Thanks to my advisor Tulja & all the wonderful collaborators- Ale @ornithoale.bsky.social, Katie @kasolari.bsky.social, Akshata, Kullu, Rinchen, Lamaji. 1/7 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Check out our newest study published in Science Advances last Friday ❤️

Wednesday, August 13, 2025, 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM EDT Preparing for a Career at a Research Station Career Central Room 1 (Exhibit Hall)

Presentations LB 13-177 - Wildfire resilience initiatives at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve ('Ootchamin 'Ooyakma) with outcomes in collaboration, research, education and stewardship. Thursday, August 14, 2025, 5:00 PM – 6:30 PM EDT Presenting Author - Jorge Ramos

See you at #ESA2025 next week!Find me at the ESA SEEDS events, Wed, 10:30 AM Panel on Careers at a Research Station with OBFS friends; and Thu, 5 PM Poster LB 13-177 on Wildfire resilience initiatives at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve ('Ootchamin 'Ooyakma)!

Junior, Assistant, or Associate Specialist – Xue Lab University of California, Irvine is hiring. Apply now!

The Xue lab at UC Irvine is looking for a staff scientist to support our work investigating how microbes interact and evolve in the gut microbiome! Open to a wide range of previous experience levels, see ad for more.
recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09601

A nine panel overview of native insects on native plants from our yard. Starting in the upper left, Agapostemon (a native bee) on echinacea, a young grasshopper, a Mydas fly swamp milkweed, a woolcarder bee with just its butt showing out of an obedient plant flower, two mating milkweed bugs (strikingly yellow and red) on milkweed, a hoverfly on a cherry blossom, another hoverfly on queen of the prairie flowerbuds, a monarch butterfly on blazing star, and a great black wasp on mountain mint.

Of course the main purpose of a yard is to attract bugs, and the best way to attract bugs is with native plants, so that’s mostly what we do. Here’s a sampling—descriptions in alt text. 🐝🦋🐛🐜🪰🪲🐞 (Remaining grass lets us play games and lets doggies chase balls, but is slowly going to clover)

The Human Shield Hypothesis: Does Predator Avoidance of Humans Create Refuges for Prey? The human shield hypothesis posits that predators avoid areas of human disturbance due to perceived risk from humans, and prey therefore seeks refuge in these areas of perceived safety. Our systemati....

Have you ever cited or come across a mention of the 'human shield hypothesis' and wondered: what is the evidence for this hypothesis, and what is the quality of that evidence? Wonder no more!
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

It was a pleasure to work with my amazing interdisciplinary team of coauthors: @ornithoale.bsky.social, Maya Xu, @flamingmuffinz.bsky.social, Mei Li Palmeri, Meggie Callahan, Nicole Ardoin, and Gretchen Daily

This underscores the importance of urban community gardens - not only do they provide habitat for biodiversity and opportunities to access nature, but also many other benefits: social connections, education, and food sovereignty. Let’s work to protect and advocate for urban community gardens!

Regardless, these results are exciting - they suggest that community gardens have the potential to provide access to nature across an income gradient! People in both high and low income neighborhoods in San Francisco can have positive interactions with birds in gardens.

Why might this be? It could be because birds are highly mobile organisms, the nature of San Francisco (compact, lots of greenspace, heterogenous), regional effects (luxury effect is stronger in tropical and arid environments), or community gardens themselves.

For example, we expected lower income neighborhoods to have less canopy cover and therefore less avian species richness, but instead found all three of these variables were unrelated!

Instead, we found that avian species richness and abundance were predicted by local and landscape-scale environmental factors, very few of which were correlated with income.

Surprisingly, given past studies on the luxury effect that show higher biodiversity in higher income neighborhoods, we found no relationships between any of these metrics and garden income!

For each garden, we compared three bird metrics with garden income: species richness, abundance, and a species access metric, a metric for our 10 focal species that was higher where there were more individuals from species people noticed and cared about.

We dug into why attitudes differed. While less-popular species had mostly aesthetic disservices, popular species had both ecological and aesthetic services. This suggests that providing education about species’ ecological roles could be an important conservation tool!

However, we also wanted to understand how much gardeners noticed each species. When we weighted sentiment scores by recognition, the scores of less-charismatic species like the Black Phoebe dropped.

Using these results, we were able to assign each species a “sentiment score” and rank them in terms of positive sentiment. Most species had more positive than negative words associated with them, while corvids were the exception.

For each species, we performed a sentiment analysis, classifying words into positive, negative and neutral. While species like the Anna’s Hummingbird had primarily positive associations, others like the American Crow, were more controversial.

We also examined gardener attitudes towards 10 common garden species, chosen to capture a range of traits, through a word association task.