Laura M. Cisneros

University of Connecticut | UConn · Department of Natural Resources and the Environment

Why Community Engagement? The disproportionate and unequal risks of environmental hazards and climate change on specific communities and groups of people are becoming more evident with a growing body of studies (Clark et al., 2014; EPA, 2021). Indeed, the lack of community voice in environmental solutions will continue to prevent environmental orga...

Background It is crucial to support students in better understanding water and sustainability issues because water plays a vital role in maintaining global ecosystems, including human life. A wide range of curricular and instructional supports like those embodied in model-based learning (MBL) are necessary for teachers to engage students in the cor...

The environment, science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics fields (a collection of fields we call E-STEAM) continue to grow and remain economically and ecologically important. However, historically excluded groups remain underrepresented in science and technology professions, particularly in environmental and digital media fields. Con...

Families create contexts for learning to enhance and support the interests of their children, while simultaneously teaching language, morals, and culture. This research examines intergenerational family teams engaged in a long-term conservation project in their community. Participants were interviewed during and after project completion with the ce...

In addition to changes associated with climate and land use, parrots are threatened by hunting and capture for the pet trade, making them one of the most at risk orders of birds for which conservation action is especially important. Species richness is often used to identify high priority areas for conserving biodiversity. By definition, richness c...

The integration of STEM and environmental education can be a powerful strategy to engage and motivate diverse learners, as it encourages participation that prioritizes application of scientific disciplinary knowledge and practices to address relevant and current environmental solutions. Benefits of environmental experiential learning are well-docum...

Our research analyzed two years of data from a 5-year NSF-funded informal STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) program. Our program aims to support the development and maintenance of STEM identities in intergenerational teams learning geospatial technologies and conservation science to develop and implement community land-use pr...

Researchers and practitioners have identified numerous outcomes of place-based environmental action (PBEA) programs at both individual and community levels (e.g., promoting positive youth development, fostering science identity, building social capital, and contributing to environmental quality improvement). In many cases, the primary audience of P...

This research aimed to better understand the interaction between positioning and STEM identity authoring as intergenerational teams collaborated to complete community conservation projects, following a two-day conservation and geospatial technology workshop. Scientists and science educators supported these learners as they developed the focus, reso...

An in-depth curricular unit exploring the effects of human land use on local water resources was created as part of a Teacher Professional Learning Program at the University of Connecticut’s Natural Resources Conservation Academy. This unit was designed to connect high school students to water resources in their community, both in the field and thr...

Decades of research suggest that species richness depends on spatial characteristics of habitat patches, especially their size and isolation. In contrast, the habitat amount hypothesis predicts that: 1) species richness in plots of fixed size (species density) is more strongly and positively related to the amount of habitat around the plot than to...

Aim The incorporation of functional and phylogenetic information is necessary to comprehensively characterize spatial patterns of biodiversity and to evaluate the relative importance of ecological and evolutionary mechanisms in molding such patterns. We evaluated the relative importance of mechanisms that shape passerine biodiversity along an exten...

Because biodiversity is increasingly threatened by habitat destruction and climate change, conservation agencies face challenges associated with an uncertain future. In addition to changes associated with climate and land use, parrots are threatened by hunting and capture for the pet trade, making them the most at-risk order of birds in the world....

Recognition of the Anthropocene epoch formally acknowledges the pervasive and increasingly dominant effects of human activities on the world’s biomes. A defining characteristic of the Anthropocene is habitat conversion (land-use change) for agricultural and urbanized land uses. Within this context, landscape ecology is of critical importance as it...

We present a complete dataset from the literature on functional traits including morphological measurements, dietary information, foraging strategy, and foraging location for all 398 extant species of parrots. The morphological measurements include: mass, total length, wing chord, culmen length, tarsus length, and tail length. The diet data describ...

University of Connecticut Extension educators are engaged in a new program that fosters intergenerational informal science, technology, engineering, and math learning through combining geospatial technology and conservation science. Conservation Training Partnerships (CTP) is a program that brings together adult conservation leaders and high-school...

Forest edges influence more than half of the world's forests and contribute to worldwide declines in biodiversity and ecosystem functions. However, predicting these declines is challenging in heterogeneous fragmented landscapes. Here we assembled a global dataset on species responses to fragmentation and developed a statistical approach for quantif...

Habitat conversion creates a mosaic of land cover types, which affect the spatial distribution, diversity, and abundance of resources. We used abundance, functional, and phylogenetic information to determine if Neotropical bat communities exhibited phylogenetic or functional overdispersion or underdispersion in response to habitat conversion. Overd...

Background Assembly of species into communities following human disturbance (e.g., deforestation, fragmentation) may be governed by spatial (e.g., dispersal) or environmental (e.g., niche partitioning) mechanisms. Variation partitioning has been used to broadly disentangle spatial and environmental mechanisms, and approaches utilizing functional an...

Relationships among taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic dimensions of biodiversity provide insight about the relative contributions of ecological and evolutionary processes in structuring local assemblages. We used data for rodent species distributions from an extensive tropical elevational gradient to 1) describe elevational gradients for each...

Aim To identify characteristics of a human‐modified landscape that promote taxonomic ( TD ), functional ( FD ) and phylogenetic ( PD ) dimensions of bat biodiversity. Location Caribbean lowlands of northeastern Costa Rica. Methods During the dry and wet seasons, we quantified TD (Simpson's diversity), as well as FD and PD (Rao's quadratic entropy...

Fragmentation per se due to human land conversion is a landscape‐scale phenomenon. Accordingly, assessment of distributional patterns across a suite of potentially connected communities (i.e. metacommunity structure) is an appropriate approach for understanding the effects of landscape modification and complements the plethora of fragmentation stud...

Anthropogenic modification of landscapes is global and pervasive. Such landscapes comprise more native vegetation than do landscapes with no human impact. Moreover, these alterations have contributed to the accelerated loss of biodiversity and compromised ecosystem services. Consequently, development of appropriate conservation policies requires an...

Habitat fragmentation studies have produced complex results that are challenging to synthesize. Inconsistencies among studies may result from variation in the choice of landscape metrics and response variables, which is often compounded by a lack of key statistical or methodological information. Collating primary datasets on biodiversity responses...

Research concerning spatial dynamics of biodiversity generally has been limited to considerations of the taxonomic dimension, which is insensitive to interspecific variation in ecological or evolutionary characteristics that play important roles in species assembly and provide linkages to ecosystem services. Consequently, the assumption that the ta...

Background/Question/Methods The past decade has witnessed a revolution in biodiversity science in that functional and phylogenetic dimensions, rather than simply the taxonomic dimension, have increasingly been used to understand ecological and biogeographic processes governing species assembly at various spatial scales. For the phylogenetic dimens...

Reproductive phenologies of populations are strongly molded by environmental variation because natural selection favors individuals that time energetically demanding portions of their life cycle to correspond with periods of high resource availability. To evaluate how seasonal variation in abiotic characteristics and resources affects reproductive...

Background/Question/Methods Deepening our understanding of biological diversity requires consideration of taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic dimensions to characterize the evolutionary and ecological variation represented by groups of species. Nonetheless, simultaneous considerations of multiple dimensions of biodiversity for multiple taxa a...

Background/Question/Methods Scientific understanding of the spatiotemporal dynamics of biodiversity is primarily based on considerations of the taxonomic dimension. Such approaches are insensitive to ecological or evolutionary differences among species, which may play dominant roles during species assembly into local communities along environment...

Aim We evaluated the structure of metacommunities for each of three vertebrate orders (Chiroptera, Rodentia and Passeriformes) along an extensive elevational gradient. Using elevation as a proxy for variation in abiotic characteristics and the known elevational distributions of habitat types, we assessed the extent to which variation in those facto...

Elevational gradients provide a natural experiment for assessing the extent to which the structure of animal metacommunities is molded by biotic and abiotic characteristics that change gradually, or is molded by aspects of plant community composition and physiognomy that change in a more discrete fashion. We used a metacommunity framework to integr...