Huge thanks to UCSC’s Gage Dayton & Kelly Zilliacus, who led the postfire monitoring efforts across the UCNRS & collected baseline data that made this work possible, now featured in our new @jappliedecology.bsky.social paper!

That experience changed how I think about long-term trends & what it means to do ecology in systems shaped by frequent disturbances.

Over the next few years, I watched these landscapes regain color, sound - and eventually, ticks.

I didn’t plan to study fire. But when I showed up to my field sites in Jan 2020, some of the state’s largest fire complexes had burned through many of them.

however we found this effect to be Culex species dependent, with urban mosquitoes less impacted by environmental fluctuation - possibly bc they’re supplemented by urban H20 sources even during dry years

We looked at 3.6 M mosquitoes from >500K trap nights collected by Kern Co Vector Control & paired it with environmental variables including drought metrics

We find that bats preferentially forage over rice fields & their occurrences overlap areas with high mosquito activity, suggesting a potential role in controlling ag pests