STEAM

Last semester I taught my course in tropical ecology and conservation with John Blake.  The class is for undergrads, but we also allow graduate students from the social sciences and humanities to take it to complete their requirements for the Tropical Conservation and Development Program  As part of the course, we always ask them to do a group project, and this year we had the opportunity to help Dr. Eric Segal from the Harn Museum of Art.  The Harn has been loaned five fantastic chromolithographs of birds by Jean Théodore Descourtilz (Brazil, c. 1796-1855), but they needed help in identifying the species represented and preparing summaries of what the plates depicted.  We handed this off to three students - Becky Williams, Leah Henderson, & Scott Macrae - and  what they put together far exceeded our expectations.  Want to learn more?  You can check out the web page they put together here.

Update (may 9 2013): Robert Wells from UF/IFAS Communications wrote  nice press release, which can be found here (and in Portuguese here) Thanks also to Tyler Jones, also from UF/IFAS Communications, for the great photographs, one of which is above.