Environmental Internship Program - 2023 Booklet

BIODIVERSITY AND
CONSERVATION
PROJECT TITLE
Understanding
Biodiversity Loss in Large
Tropical Forest Fragments
ORGANIZATION(S)
Wilcove Lab,
Department of Ecology
and Evolutionary Biology,
Princeton University
LOCATION(S)
Mato Grosso, Brazil
MENTOR(S)
David Wilcove,
Professor of Ecology and
Evolutionary Biology and
Public Affairs and the
High Meadows
Environmental Institute;
Alex Wiebe, Ph.D.
candidate, Ecology and
Evolutionary Biology
David Dorini ’25
ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY
I worked on a project studying the effects of
forest fragmentation on bird communities in
the Brazilian Amazon. Forest fragmentation is
an issue for birds and biodiversity in general. It
is a particularly important issue in the face of
the widespread deforestation in the Brazilian
Amazon, an area known for its enormous
biodiversity. We conducted fieldwork in Mato
Grosso, Brazil to examine forest fragments of
diverse sizes. In each fragment, I assisted with
a series of point counts to document every
individual bird that was heard or seen from
each point. I also assisted with surveys of mixed
species flocks, which provided a different method
of sampling bird communities in each fragment,
and environmental surveys to document leaf
litter depth and the number of groundcover
plants in different transects throughout each
fragment. I gained a focused understanding
of habitat fragmentation and mechanisms of
species loss and a greater understanding of
concepts in ecology and biology more generally.
It was particularly rewarding to see concepts that
I had studied in class applied in the field, and I
hope to further study some of these concepts in
my own research at Princeton.
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