TEXAS - Key Persons

My name is Sylvia de la Piedra and I am a Graduate Research Assistant in the Geospatial Technologies Lab at Texas Tech University. I started this blog to document my experiences as a grad student and the intricacies involved in this process of professional and personal growth. I went to Cornell University for my Bachelors and received an Advanced Graduate Certificate in Animal Behavior from CUNY Hunter College. My college career has been somewhat circuitous, having started at Cornell as an architecture major and ending up at Texas Tech in the Department of Natural Resources Management. I have done varied work in the field of ecology: studying savannah community ecology in Kenya, coyote population ecology in the New York metropolitan area, dolphin cognition and communication in the Bahamas, and lemur behavioral ecology in Madagascar. My thesis research at Tech consists of analyzing whether there is a relationship between the variable length of the vegetative growing season and lesser prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus Pallidicinctus) populations over the last decade. In other words, I am using remote sensing technologies (i.e. satellite images) to look at plants' growing season (when plants start getting green in the spring and when they start drying out again and become brown in the fall) and seeing if there is a connection between those changes and the birds' entire population in the last 10 years.