Laboratory technical staff member Susan Rupp of Ecology (ENV-ECO) will speak about the effects of the 2000 Cerro Grande Fire on elk and vegetation in Bandelier National Monument at a talk Tuesday (Dec. 6) in the Bradbury Science Museum.
The talk begins at 6:30 p.m., and is free and open to the public.
According to Rupp, “the interaction of large-scale fires, vegetation and elk is an important management issue, but few studies have addressed the ecological implications of vegetation recovery on elk populations following large-scale disturbance events.”
Rupp will talk about recent studies carried out over a three-year period by the Laboratory, National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service in which geographic positioning systems collars were used to track the locations of 54 elk over a three-plus-year period. Primary objectives of this research were to identify elk movement pathways on local and landscape scales to determine environmental factors that influence elk movement, and to evaluate movement and distribution patterns in relation to spatial and temporal aspects of the Cerro Grande Fire, she said.
Rupp earned her master’s and doctoral degrees in wildlife science at Texas Tech University. She also has bachelor’s degrees in wildlife biology and biology from Colorado State University. She is a certified associate wildlife biologist with the Wildlife Society and a member of the Society for Conservation Biology. She has published numerous papers in scientific journals on elk management in the Jemez Mountains.
Rupp received the Canon National Parks Science Scholars Program award in 2001 sponsored by the National Park Service and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The Bradbury Science Museum is located at 15th Street and Central Avenue in downtown Los Alamos. Museum hours apart from special events are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday and 1 to 5 p.m., Sunday and Monday. It is closed on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's days.
The Bradbury Science Museum is part of Los Alamos' Public Affairs Office.
For more information about Bradbury Science Museum, go to http://www.lanl.gov/museum/ online or contact Pat Berger at 5-0896.
