A UCF  doctoral student has helped position UCF as a contributor to the North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat), a coordinated effort to track bat populations across North America using standardized acoustic methods.

Research Path Rooted in Responsibility

Ifer White, who serves as a graduate teaching associate while pursuing a Ph.D. in integrative and conservation biology, describes herself as a non-traditional student whose educational journey has been shaped by family, service and resilience.

“My Muscogee-Creek heritage has deeply influenced how I view the natural world, not as something separate from us, but as something we are accountable to,” White says. “That worldview has guided my commitment to wildlife rescue and rehabilitation for more than a decade, and specifically to bat rehabilitation for the past seven years.”

Florida is home to 13 resident bat species, including the Brazilian free-tailed bat and the southeastern myotis. These highly specialized creatures are the only mammals capable of sustained flight and play a crucial role in maintaining healthy ecosystems. They help control insect populations—consuming thousands in a single night—while also contributing to pollination, seed dispersal, and more.

“My work is driven by a desire to ensure these often-misunderstood animals continue to thrive in increasingly human-dominated landscapes,” White says.

Bringing NABat to UCF

As a board member of the Florida Bat Working Group and the Florida Bat Conservancy, White saw an opportunity to integrate applied conservation science with campus engagement. She approached the Florida Fish and Wildlif Conservation Commission and leadership about adding the university to the NABat monitoring grid.

“Because there are known bat colonies on campus, participation was a natural fit.” — Ifer White, doctoral student

“T��� North American Bat Monitoring Program provides a standardized framework for long-term bat population monitoring across the continent,” White says. “Because there are known bat colonies on campus, participation was a natural fit.”

Although UCF’s geographic grid cell is relatively small, its urban and suburban context fills important gaps in regional datasets.

“Urban and suburban monitoring locations are underrepresented in many long-term datasets,” White says. “T��� acoustic data collected on campus help fill knowledge gaps in Central Florida and the broader southeastern region.”

The Science Behind Acoustic Monitoring

Bats navigate and hunt using echolocation, emitting ultrasonic calls that are species-specific in frequency and structure. Acoustic detectors placed strategically on UCF’s main campus record these high-frequency calls throughout the night.

“Detectors are deployed for multiple consecutive nights each quarter,” White says. “Recordings are processed using specialized acoustic software that filters out noise and classifies calls to species or species groups based on call parameters.”

These measurements  allow researchers to compare bat presence and relative activity across sites and over time.

“In wildlife conservation, data comparability is everything,” White says. “Without standardized methods, datasets become fragmented and difficult to interpret.”

UCF’s data are submitted to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute and ultimately contribute to broader analyses coordinated with Bat Conservation International, informing wildlife action plans and habitat management strategies.

Turning Research into Action

White’s dissertation research focuses on ecotoxicology, host–pathogen dynamics and immunogenetics in bats. While distinct from the monitoring project, she says understanding species presence and habitat use provides essential ecological context for studying environmental stressors.

“Bats are often misunderstood, yet they are essential components of healthy ecosystems.”

Acoustic data will also help determine which species are using campus habitats and guide potential enhancements, such as strategically placed bat houses and expanded native, night-blooming plantings to support nocturnal insect populations.

“Bats are often misunderstood, yet they are essential components of healthy ecosystems,” White says. “Every action [we take] contributes to long-term conservation.”

This research and the skills and tactics she’s putting to use with this project are directly transferable to the careers Knights with similar research backgrounds can pursue after graduation in wildlife agencies and environmental consulting.

These findings challenge existing hypotheses and provide important data for assessing risks from human activity and informing conservation efforts.

The study, funded largely in part by Florida RESTORE Act Centers of Excellence Program, was published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, representing the largest satellite tracking dataset of wild-caught juvenile sea turtle behavior from the Gulf of Mexico during this life stage, spanning from 2011 to 2022.

“One of the main findings is where these sea turtles are and where they go in this life stage because we haven’t known much about it,” says ’22�ʳ��, who led the study alongside Nathan Putman and . Phillips says understanding these movement patterns among juvenile sea turtles will help guide conservation efforts to protect critical habitats for these species.

After hatching, sea turtles are known to leave their nests on land and enter the ocean where they spend their early years. This shift from terrestrial to oceanic habitat marks a critical transition in their life cycle to a life stage that has been understudied.

According to Mansfield, co-author of the study, professor of biology at UCF, and director of the UCF Marine Turtle Research Group, we are still learning about this life stage and it’s more complex than assumed.

“We don’t know what they’re eating, about their health, if and when they associate with floating algae called sargassum, which provides some protection,” Mansfield says.

The team of researchers tagged 131 juvenile sea turtles — 94 green turtles, 28 Kemp’s ridleys, five loggerheads, and four hawksbills — and tracked their movements using satellite-equipped, solar-powered platform transmitter terminals. These movements were compared with those of oceanographic surface drifters, floating objects used to study how sea turtle movements are influenced by ocean currents.

Researchers believe juvenile sea turtles swim offshore as an adaptive behavior to avoid predators such as birds, sharks and other fish, which are more abundant near the shoreline. Their small size makes them particularly vulnerable, so offshore waters can provide a safer refuge.

“One of the longstanding assumptions, is that juvenile sea turtles stay far offshore. Researchers call this the ‘oceanic life stage,’ which means off the continental shelf in waters deeper than 200 meters,” Phillips says. “However, what we found was that the turtles in this life stage are crossing over the continental shelf into neritic zones a lot more than we expected.”

A continental shelf is the gently sloping, shallow underwater area that extends between the shoreline and the continental slope, where the seabed drops steeply into the deep ocean at the shelf break. This shelf includes the neritic zone, which is the part of the ocean closest to the coast, characterized by nutrient-rich waters and a high concentration of marine life.

Phillips says the sea turtles were found crossing over to shallower waters and closer to shore, but it did not appear that they were transitioning to their next life stage, where they typically move to shallow habitats and feed off the bottom. Instead, the turtles seemed to approach the shore, then turned to avoid it.

“That was interesting because we had these passive drifters that we released with them and many of them washed up shore and none of the turtles did,” Phillips says.

She adds that if the turtles don’t behave like passive particles drifting with the currents and can actively swim and control their position, then existing movement models could consider both factors to correct errors in projections.

Existing hypotheses about the early life stage of most sea turtle species suggested they live exclusively in oceanic environments, drift passively with ocean currents and typically do not return to their previous habitat once they transitioned to a new one. However, these assumptions lack research into actual movement behavior.

“Historically, all our information about this young life stage has been limited to opportunistic sightings of these little, hard-to-see animals from boats passing by, tracking work on hatchlings in the first 24 hours after leaving nesting beaches, or laboratory studies,” Mansfield says.

Previous work also focused on the North Atlantic and on loggerheads, a species that commonly nested on the east coast of the U.S.

“I think it’s important to get data from different places and put the puzzle together to get a bigger picture of what’s going on,” Phillips says. “Researchers tracking this species were finding that they were staying offshore. But now that turtles are tracked from more places, we are finding that there are more nuances to what goes on. Loggerheads, for instance, we found stay off the continental shelf located in the west coast of Florida.”

Mansfield says sea turtle tracking can be costly, labor intensive, and the technology has limitations.

“It’s really hard to follow and manually track a little turtle over time,” Mansfield says. “You have to fuel a boat with researchers who have a strong stomach to go into the ocean. Historically, technology just wasn’t there to put a tag on a turtle and use satellites to be able to remotely track where they went. Tags were battery powered and as big as a brick.”

Prior to her time at UCF, Mansfield figured out a method to safely tag and effectively track small turtles, thanks to more reliable tagging technology, which played a role in conducting this study and achieving its results. She also credits their partnership with Inwater Research Group in helping to catch and track smaller sea turtles.

This research into sea turtle movement during the “lost years,” provides data for conservationists to assess and manage risks from human activity.

“T��� Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 was a bit of the origin story of this project,” Mansfield says. “If we have another oil spill, we need to know whether these animals [will be] transient through an area, stuck there due to currents, or if they’ll end up somewhere else.”

Data from this study is already driving conservation efforts, including a proposal for critical habitat designation under the Endangered Species Act for green sea turtles. This designation would complement earlier tracking data led by Mansfield, which established critical habitat for loggerheads — the sargassum algae nursery.

Mansfield and Phillips say if assumptions are that these animals are strictly oceanic, then they may not be protecting them completely or addressing what they need for their eventual recovery.

“If sea turtles are occurring on the continental shelf, we suggest renaming this life stage to ‘dispersal stage’ to account for their behavior,” Mansfield says. “This is important nuance in their life history, and the new terminology reflects a better understanding of sea turtle behavior, revealing more about these lost years.”

Funding information

Funding and support for this research was provided in part by the NOAA Oil Spill Supplemental Spend Plan, NOAA Southeast Fisheries Science Center, Florida RESTORE Act Centers of Excellence Program administered through the Florida Institute of Oceanography, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Friends of Gumbo Limbo Gordon J. Gilbert Grant, Microwave Telemetry Christiane Howey Rising Scholar Award, U.S. National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships Program, UCF Boyd Lyon Memorial Fellowship, National Research Council Research Associateship Program, and the Ů��AV.

Researchers’ credentials

Katrina Phillips, doctoral graduate, integrative and conservation biology, UCF; postdoctoral researcher, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Katherine Mansfield, professor, Department of Biology, UCF; director, Marine Turtle Research Group; and Davis-Shine Endowed Professorship in Conservation Biology

Nathan Putman, senior scientist, LGL Ecological Research Associates

The lowland leopard frog, found in river drainages in Arizona, is one of a few amphibian species in which some individuals survive infection by Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis chytrid fungus (Bd) while other individuals do not—even when they live in the same local population.

In a study of lowland leopard frogs infected with Bd, the fungus that causes the disease chytridiomycosis or chytrid, researchers found that frogs that died from the disease had higher expression of major histocompatibility complex and other immune system genes than frogs that survived it.

Those genes help organisms fight off infections and foreign substances.

“This result was totally counterintuitive and the opposite of the pattern we expected to recover,” says Anna Savage, the study’s lead author, an associate professor in UCF’s and former postdoctoral fellow at SCBI’s Center for Conservation Genomics (CCG).

“My previous research on these immune genes showed that some variants were associated with higher survival to Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, so I hypothesized that those genes were enabling the frogs to have a stronger immune response that would kill the fungus,” she says. “Instead, it seems like those stronger responses are linked to susceptibility, and the genes associating with survival are linked to reduced immune function.”

Savage says acquired immune responses can be very potent, require a lot of energy from the body and can sometimes produce toxic byproducts that harm the host and the pathogen.

“Immune responses are much more complex than just an on-off switch,” she says. “A big part of the immune system is regulating the type, timing and dosage of a particular response, and if any of those components get dysregulated, it can have extremely negative consequences.”

She says, for instance, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis suppresses the host immune system by killing B and T lymphocytes. “Because those are the same cells that proliferate during acquired immune responses, producing lots of those cells might just be wasting energy on something that chytrid can easily destroy,” she says.

Amphibian populations are in decline around the world, with two-thirds of the world’s 8,000 species considered to be threatened and nearly 200 species that have already gone extinct in the last two decades. In the U.S., amphibian populations overall are declining at a rate of nearly 4 percent a year, with some areas, such as the Rocky Mountains and the West Coast, facing a higher rate of decline, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Although the researchers studied immune gene expression in lowland leopard frogs with chytridiomycosis, the findings may be useful for studying the disease in other frog species due to genetic similarities they share, Savage says.

Lowland leopard frogs were chosen for the study because their responses to chytridiomycosis vary from one individual to the next, unlike many other frog species that are completely susceptible to the disease or are completely resistant or tolerant.

This allowed the researchers to rule out genetic variation between species and pinpoint specific differences in lowland leopard frogs’ immune genes that predicted different responses to infection.

The frogs were collected in Arizona and shipped overnight to the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C., where the infection experiments were conducted. Subsequent analyses of gene expression occurred at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute’s Center for Conservation Genomics. Statistical analyses of the data were performed at UCF.

Robert Fleischer, senior scientist and head of the SCBI’s CCG, co-authored the study and was Savage’s main advisor for the research when she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian. Fleischer says the results help in understanding why some frogs survive the disease and others do not.

“If we can solve this mystery, and we have taken a big step in that direction with this study, our hope and plan is to use this information to develop resources and strategies to mitigate the disease in the more susceptible species, and to counter the worldwide tide of extinction and endangerment caused by chytrid,” he says.

The researcher says the findings also show that acquired immune responses, such as those generated by vaccination, may not always be useful in combating invasive diseases of conservation concern.

Brian Gratwicke, a conservation biologist with SCBI; Katherine Hope, an associate veterinarian with the Smithsonian’s National Zoo; and Ed Bronikowski, senior curator of the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, were study co-authors as well.

The research was funded by a Smithsonian Institution Competitive Grants Program for Science grant, the Smithsonian’s Center for Conservation Genomics and a Smithsonian Institution Molecular Evolution Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Savage received her doctorate in ecology and evolutionary biology from Cornell University. She is a member of UCF’s Genomics and Bioinformatics Cluster and joined UCF’s Department of Biology, part of UCF’s College of Sciences, in 2015.

Some scientists are also setting their sights on new uses – saving endangered species and possibly eliminating invasive ones to manage wildlife populations for conservation.

However, a ��AV researcher and her colleagues have found that people living in the U.S. are wary of using this technology to achieve wildlife conservation goals.

And this insight is important, as new technology and procedures launched without public input can face backlash later.

The findings were published recently in the journal Conservation Biology.

The research represents the first large-scale, systematic survey of U.S. public opinion toward using gene editing for conservation efforts.

“I think scientists learned a lot from what has occurred with genetic modification of crops,” says Patrice Kohl, an assistant professor in UCF’s Nicholson School of Communication and Media and lead author of the study. “In the 1990s, biotechnology companies rolled out genetically modified crops without any public input, and there was fierce public pushback in response to that. So, I think there is a lot of interest among scientists in avoiding that happening again.”

CRISPR, or clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, is a fast and inexpensive method of genetic engineering that can be used almost like “scissors” to edit DNA without introducing foreign genetic material.

It has also enabled scientists to develop gene drives, a technique that would allow a genetic edit to spread rapidly throughout a wildlife population.

Compared with other emerging fields of research, such as nanotechnology and using gene editing in humans, there has been little public opinion research on gene editing in wildlife, Kohl says.

And understanding public opinion on this emerging technology is not only important for scientists seeking public buy-in so their efforts aren’t wasted or their technologies put on a shelf, but it also can inform government officials when deciding how to regulate them.

“It’s everybody’s planet, and there are huge implications for using this technology,” Kohl says. “I think scientists are interested in making sure their technologies or practices are rolled out in ways that are socially acceptable.”

Proposals to use gene editing as a wildlife conservation tool include applications that could help endangered species as well as applications that could reduce or eliminate invasive ones.

For example, conservation scientists have proposed using CRISPR to improve disease immunity in populations of the endangered black-footed ferret.

There has also been interest in employing CRISPR-based tools to reduce or eliminate small invasive mammals on islands, such as the Galapagos or New Zealand, where they have devastated native bird species.

“But what if you introduce a gene-edited rat to reduce their populations on an island and then that rat escapes the island and you drive that rat species extinct?” Kohl says. “That has consequences for everyone across the entire planet.”

Although the public opinion study didn’t specify any particular species that could be saved or eliminated, its findings do offer an overview of people’s attitudes toward the risk and benefit of using gene editing for wildlife conservation in general, as well as the factors that could affect those attitudes.

The study analyzed data from a nationally representative survey of 1,600 U.S. adults from December 2016 to January 2017.

It found that, overall, respondents significantly perceived the risks of gene editing wildlife as outweighing the benefits.

More than 80 percent of survey respondents thought it would be at least somewhat risky to nature and humans to use gene editing as a tool to manage wildlife, while 55 to 63 percent thought that it would be at least somewhat beneficial for nature and humans.

However, among individuals who strongly believe in the authority of scientific knowledge, gene editing in wildlife was perceived as more beneficial and less risky.

Respondents also viewed using gene editing tools to help species survive as more morally acceptable than using them to reduce or eliminate species.

And even though respondents were skeptical of the technology, Kohl says that doesn’t necessarily mean they wouldn’t support it.

“Just because you think something is risky doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t think something should be done,” she says. “A lot of medical treatments are risky but sometimes you have to do something that’s a little risky to take care of a problem. With cancer, for example, chemotherapy is risky, but that doesn’t mean people think it should necessarily be off the table.”

Co-authors of the study were Dominique Brossard, professor and chair of the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Dietram Scheufele, a chaired professor in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Michael Xenos, a professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The study was funded by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

Kohl received her doctorate in life sciences communication and her master’s and bachelor’s in journalism and mass communication from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She joined Ů��AV in 2018.

The Wilburforce Conservation Leadership Award includes a cash award of US$10,000 to the individual, plus an accompanying US$5,000 to the organization where the recipient works. There are no stipulations attached to the award.

Noss is the Davis-Shine Professor of Conservation Biology at the Ů��AV. He is one of the nation’s leading conservation biologists, a co-founder of The Wildlands Project and a past president of the Society for Conservation Biology. He has written more than 250 scientific papers on wildlife conservation, landscape ecology, ecosystem management, and ecological reserve design.

At UCF his current research program is increasingly interdisciplinary and includes work on fire ecology, forest and grassland restoration and management, the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow and its dry prairie habitat, Florida Scrub-Jays, and the Florida Panther.