Here are some photos from our field trips to Minamisanriku Town and around Aobayama campus placing camera traps to monitor wildlife. We collected lots of data and detected many animal species, including Japanese serow (kamoshika), Japanese deer (shika), and a family of masked palm civets (hakubishin). We will continue monitoring each year and we plan to expand to new sites. The data we collect will be used to model site occupancy and abundance of each species, as well as how environmental factors affect these patterns over time. At the same time, we are recording bioacoustics to catalog diversity and temporal patterns of birds and insects, and we are also collecting site-level temperature and light intensity for our models.

Suzuki (PhD), Kaneko, Matsumoto, and Yamaguchi (undergrads) gave oral presentations about their work at the 69th Ecological Society of Japan Tohoku at Hirosaki University in Aomori. They received many insights for their future research from the other participants, and the undergrads had their first conference experience, which was very rewarding. The Tohoku regional meeting of ESJ is an important venue for ecologists in this region to get together and learn from each other, so we plan on attending and presenting every year.