Fabiola Rodríguez Vásquez

Expertise

Ecology • Conservation Science • Quantitative Ecology • Neotropical Ecosystems

I explore and validate the use of birds as indicators of biodiversity and ecosystem health in agricultural landscapes of Central and South America.

I am passionate about learning about birds and how they interact with their habitats. I am motivated by research where I can contribute to the understanding of avian ecology and can help inform conservation strategies.

During my Masters, I studied the ecology of the endemic Honduran Emerald Hummingbird in a working landscape in Honduras where cattle farming was the main livelihood. My research integrated natural history with population and spatial ecology to model the distribution of the species in a dry forest valley and to evaluate what vegetation attributes influenced species abundance.

During my Ph.D., I combined quantitative skills and field surveys to understand aspects of the distribution and habitat quality of migratory songbirds during their nonbreeding phase. Part of my work evaluated how songbird individuals’ body condition and apparent survival respond to different types of coffee farm management and the landscape attributes surrounding a farm in a coffee-producing region in Honduras.

At the Cornell Lab, my postdoctoral work focuses on developing quantitative methods to explore and validate the use of eBird data products to monitor biodiversity and ecosystem health in agricultural landscapes.

Education

Ph.D., Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Tulane University
M.Sc., Biology, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
B.Sc., Biology, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Honduras

Favorite Bird

Picking a favorite bird is tough but I have always been fascinated by species within the Furnariidae family (which includes ovenbirds and woodcreepers); hiking through a forest and seeing their behaviors of gleaning, tossing leaves and creeping up tree trunks always makes my day. Maybe one day, I will get to study them.