sam sambado

#ucnrs #ucsb #ecology

Disturbance interactions have profound consequences for forest health, yet remain poorly understood.

Here we use DAGs to differentiate #Synergisms, #CompoundDisturbances & #NetworkEffects and review the impacts of climate change.

Final version out now! 🧪🌐🍁🌱
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

postfire monitoring efforts

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!

IMO, every California ecologist should think about fire or at least spend some time with the fire ecology lit (you could teach a whole ecology class based on van Mantgem et al 2015)

postfire monitoring efforts

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

postfire vegetation recovery

postfire vegetation recovery

postfire vegetation recovery

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

burned horse trailer

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.

Of all the fieldwork I’ve done, my fire work has stayed with me the most.

Ancient origin of an urban underground mosquito Understanding how life is adapting to urban environments represents an important challenge in evolutionary biology. In this work, we investigate a widely cited example of urban adaptation, Culex pipie...

How does life evolve to adapt to modern cities?

Out now in Science, my PhD work with @lindymcbr.bsky.social uncovers the ancient origin of the “London Underground mosquito” – one of the most iconic examples of urban adaptation.

🧵(1/n)
@science.org
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ady4515

Thanks, I appreciate the s/o!

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 found that an increase in landscape wetness increases mos abundance, but decreases WNV infection rates. This has been shown in previous studies but now we put it in a quasi causal framework (ie econometric models)

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

The paradoxical impact of drought on West Nile virus risk: insights from long-term ecological data | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Mosquito-borne diseases are deeply embedded within ecological communities, with environmental changes—particularly climate change—shaping their dynamics. Increasingly intense droughts across the globe...

Does more H20 mean more mosquito-borne disease risk?

What about in an area that typically receives little rain? (~6 in/year)?

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

stay tuned for more work in this climate-driven phenology-pathogen space!

There are caveats, but we found an intriguing signal: in cooler CA sites, nymphs may emerge noticeably earlier than larvae. This trend may explain why tick infection rates are higher in these regions compared to warmer sites, where life stages emerge more synchronously.

This builds on Sambado 2024, which examined within-season (jan-june 2021), & expands to explore across-season (spring 2013-2023) dynamics in collab w lizard researchers 🦎

Climate-driven variation in the phenology of juvenile Ixodes pacificus on lizard hosts - Parasites & Vectors Background Ectothermic arthropods, like ticks, are sensitive indicators of environmental changes, and their seasonality plays a critical role in the dynamics of tick-borne disease in a warming world. ...

Also out this month in P&V: another topic close to my 💛 - tick phenology!

(tinyurl.com/yc2skb4r)

big thanks to the NCEP team for their editorial support!

These materials are designed for undergrads/techs who are new to R - and who want a conservation-centered perspective, not just typical coding tutorials 🌿📊

I 💛 teaching & long-term ecological field stations.

I have a new piece in @natural-history.bsky.social’s Lessons in Conservation that intertwines my teaching lessons from biometry & passion for long-term research sites (tinyurl.com/2kw8avtz)

I’ll highlight some of my work on droughts, wildfire & latitudinal gradients and their impact on 🦟 & 🕷️(ticks)

during my seminar I will be discussing ideas I think are professionally interesting as a disease ecologist & personally relevant as a Californian

I submitted this piece a while ago but thought I’d throw it up on rxiv prior to my defense next month. If you want to hear more about the study - DM me for a zoom link to my exit seminar!

Thanks Colin! At the very least bats are reducing nuisance pests, which is a plus 🦇

Congrats on all of the exciting pubs this week!

#Ecology

fun fact - my dad’s backyard in Acampo is part of the study area in CA’s Central Valley where I’ve witnessed these bat swarms on pleasant summer nights

This approach provides a more scalable method for quantifying the ecosystem services bats offer, complementing traditional field monitoring efforts

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

Novel Bat‐Monitoring Dataset Reveals Targeted Foraging With Agricultural and Pest Control Implications This study uses a weather-radar-based monitoring algorithm to track bat foraging in California's Northern Central Valley, revealing high bat activity concentrated around rice fields. Bat presence was...

I co-led a study w Brian Lee that applies a ML algorithm to convert weather-radar data into bat occurrence maps, which were then analyzed alongside veg & mosquito activity (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...)