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Grevy's Zebra
St. Louis Zoo: Grevy's Zebra
My main research interests revolve around semi-arid ecosystems and traditional pastoralist societies that rely upon them. My doctoral research (Population Biology, UC Davis) was in the field of restoration ecology, and examined the utility of planting native aloe shrubs into degraded Kenyan rangelands to promote vegetation recovery. Since then, I have continued to work on community-based rangeland restoration projects in Kenya. I am also keenly interested in the social and policy sides of land degradation, land tenure, and pastoralist sustainability.
As a postdoctoral researcher with the Water, Savannas and Society Initiative (supported by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies), I am collaborating with faculty and graduate students on projects ranging from ecohydrology, to landscape-herbivore interactions, to human ecology. Our research is based on communally-owned group ranches in northern Laikipia District, Kenya. This region is home to the Laikipia Maasai people, lots of charismatic megafauna, and stunning landscapes. To find out more, please contact me. egking 'at' princeton.edu
Ilya Fischhoff, Postdoctoral Researcher
Equid Research and Conservation website
Ilya is a postdoctoral researcher in the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Department at Princeton University. Ilya’s research seeks to understand how animals make decisions in the wild. How do individuals learn about change in locations, and use their past experiences in choosing where to go? In social species, each individual in a group may have different experiences and needs, resulting in their having different preferences about what to do and where to go. How do individuals interact to resolve their preferences and make a coordinated group movement? Answering these questions is important to predicting how populations will respond to changes in their landscape. For species like Grevy's zebra and plains zebra, whose needs can conflict with those of people, addressing these questions will allow us to devise better strategies for coexistence.
Ilya completed his PhD at Princeton University in March 2007. His PhD research addressed how plains zebra make movement decisions in Ol Pejeta Conservancy, Kenya. He examined how leadership roles in group movements relate to resource needs and the stability of social relationships. A second part of the study showed that plains zebra modify their movements in danger from lions. Using landscape-level manipulative experiments, Ilya found that zebras bias their movements to revisit a location that has suddenly changed in its resource value. Contact:
ifischho 'at' princeton [dot] edu
Siva Sundaresan, Postdoctoral Researcher (co-adviser)
I am currently studying Grevy’s zebra/lion predator-prey relations in northern Kenya. I work with Dan Rubenstein and Rich Reading (Denver Zoological Foundation) to develop a landscape level research project exploring the reasons for and possible mitigating measures for the current, unsustainable levels of lion predation on Grevy’s zebras in the Samburu-Laikipia region of Kenya.
While a predoctoral student at Princeton I studied how social systems emerge from individual social relationships. Species with fission-fusion social systems are promising systems for understanding how behavioral rules at the individual level affect the social organization of the population. By quantifying social dynamics in two closely related species Grevy’s zebra and Asiatic Onager, Isought to identify the effects of rainfall, predation pressure and population density.
