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Liesl Peterson
 Liesl Peterson
is a wildlife and global change ecologist, with particular interest in landscape-scale change and its impacts on mammals. She has conducted research in her home state of Idaho, as well as in Colorado, Montana, Virginia, and Malaysian Borneo. Her research generally focuses on issues of conservation concern, such as wildfire ecology, conflict between urban landscapes and wildlife, and the impact of tropical plantations on large mammals. Currently she is studying the American Pika, a resident of rocky slopes at high elevations throughout western North America, to determine whether climate change is responsible for declining pika populations. Liesl is excited to help students gain greater appreciation for the complex and beautiful ecosystems and critters that share our planet!
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Special Presentations:
Mammal Adaptation: What Interesting Hands You Have. . .All the Better to Fly With!
Though mammals all share characteristics such as warm blood, hair/fur and mammary glands, they also represent an amazing diversity of strange and wonderful characteristics such as flippers, wings, and webbed feet! Students will investigate museum specimens first-hand and make connections between these wacky adaptations and the animals' habitat, main food source, and mode of locomotion. For older students, this exercise will extend into a discussion and lesson on taxonomic classification. (Grades 3-12)
What a Tangled Web We Weave: Food Webs and Trophic Cascades
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe" ~John Muir, 1911. What is an ecosystem? And do carnivores really get their energy from the sun? In this exercise, students will learn about the movement of energy from the sun, through plants, primary, secondary, and top consumers. Students will create a food web from a given set of organisms and will demonstrate how changes to one trophic level can impact the others. Depending on grade level, topics that may be covered include: energy transfer, toxin accumulation, and the importance of top predators in the maintenance of ecosystems. (Grades 3-12)
What's the Scoop on Poop?
There's a lot more to this waste product than first meets the nose! Students will explore how wildlife biologists use scat they find in nature to learn about wild animal populations, individual health, and diet. Students will conduct bear scat surveys in the classroom along transects, collecting laminated "scat" samples that will provide genetic, hormone, and diet information. This information will allow students to determine how many individuals are in the class bear population, how stressed the animals are, and what they have been eating. (Grades 6-12)
Sexual Selection in Birds: I Like a Man Who Can Dance!
Students will learn that our attraction to certain traits in a mate are no accident - those characteristics are the result of millennia of evolution. These concepts will be explored in the complex social structures, unique mating rituals, and colorful plumage of birds. In this activity, students will follow certain traits through multiple generations and learn how sexual selection has led to a meadowlark's unique song, a peacock's spectacular tail, and even the wide variety of traits that humans find attractive in the opposite sex. (Grades 9-12)
Liesl is in her third year as a Ph.D. student in the University of Colorado's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
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