Since 2022, I have been leading a team of scientists, students, and local community partners to conduct social-ecological research across Indonesia's planned new capital city, Nusantara, in East Kalimantan. Combining bioacoustics and anthropology, we aim to document the wide-ranging impacts of the development of the new city on local forests, communities, and biodiversity.
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In 2018, I launched a collaboration (ongoing) in Central Kalimantan's Rungan River landscape, one of the largest lowland forests in Borneo with no formal protection. This area houses a rich fauna, including large populations of endangered orangutans and gibbons, yet most of it is designated for conversion. With U.K. and Indonesian collaborators, we are using bioacoustics methods to monitor flagship orangutans and gibbons in the landscape and how they respond to habitat diversity and environmental changes.
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Between 2013–2016, I led research on wild Bornean orangutans at the Tuanan Orangutan Research Project in Central Kalimantan. While studying the relationship between long calls, health, and energetics of Bornean orangutans, I led education and training programs to support peat swamp and biodiversity conservation. In 2015, I co-founded the non-profit organization CORE Borneo to support orangutan conservation.
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In 2013–2014, I co-directed a study of cooperative infant care in wild Weddell's saddleback tamarins in the Amazon Basin of Bolivia. With my collaborators (Leila Porter and Anthony Di Fiore), we are investigating the proximate and ultimate factors affecting infant care within and among individuals and groups.
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From 2005–2008, I explored male-male competition and loud calls in wild simakobu (Simias concolor), an odd-nosed monkey endemic to Indonesia's Mentawai Islands. My dissertation investigated demography, dispersal, and the impacts of human disturbance on group structure; seasonal patterns of ecology and reproduction; inter-group spatial and social relationships; loud calls as honest signals of energy status; and individual and contextual differences in the acoustic features of loud calls.
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