 
Dr. Susan Willson
Education:
Courses Offered:
Research Interests: I am a tropical avian ecologist, but I have also embraced the invertebrate world through my work with Neotropical army ants. My main interests are in tropical ecology and conservation, avian behavioral ecology, and population and community ecology of birds. I am interested in understanding the maintenance of biodiversity, as it is imperative to understand why and how species coexist so that we may try to maintain biodiversity in the face of the growing threat of climate change and anthropogenic forest fragmentation. My model study species are a group of extremely specialized and threatened Neotropical birds that feed exclusively at the antswarms of the army ants Eciton burchellii and Labidus praedator. In Amazonian Peru, I have been exploring the biotic and abiotic factors that affect relationships among five species of obligate army-ant following birds, in an effort to gain baseline ecological information from an intact system in healthy primary rainforest. I am also interested in examining the spatial ecology of the army ants that the birds rely on. Data from a pristine rainforest site are invaluable as humans continue to fragment or otherwise destroy tropical rainforest habitat, as they remind us what systems “used to be like” before human encroachment. There are many facets to this work, both in the field and in the lab, using GIS, and I encourage student involvement. In addition to my tropical work, I am looking for opportunities get students out in the field here in the North Country. A current interest that I will pursue over the coming years is the conservation of Adirondack boreal birds, which are at their southernmost distribution here. As climate change affects ecosystems, boreal bird communities are predicted to be one of the first groups to be affected here in New York. Secondly, the North Country will be the site of a rapidly growing influx of wind farms and wind turbines over the next decade. I am interested in providing an unbiased analysis of how wind turbines affect resident and migrant birds, and am looking to collaborate with the New York State DEC and others in this work.
Selected Papers and Abstracts (Undergraduate Student Coauthors are in Bold):
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