The Cooper Ornithological Society (COS) is pleased to recognize Henry Streby and Christina Riehl as the 2013 recipients of the Young Professional Award. First awarded in 2009, the Young Professional Award recognizes early-career researchers for their outstanding scientific research and contributions to the ornithological profession. Two awardees are selected from applicants to deliver presentations at the Young Professional Plenary session held at each annual meeting and are given 30 minutes each to present their research to the entire conference body. The two awardees each receive a cash prize and a travel award and are honored at a reception attended by the COS officers, board of directors, and members of the Young Professional Award committee. Candidates for the Young Professional Award must be COS members and must be in the final phase of their graduate studies (last nine months) or have graduated within three years of the previous meeting. More information is available under the awards and grants section on the COS website: www.cooper.org.
Henry Streby's research aims to combine evolutionary ecology and population management to inform evolutionarily rational management and conservation actions. Henry's graduate education in evolutionary ecology (M.S. with Donald B. Miles, Ohio University) and wildlife management (Ph.D. with David E. Andersen, University of Minnesota, Minnesota Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit) has led him to view evolutionary questions from an applied-science perspective and to recognize that evolutionary pressures must be considered in management questions. Henry's work has focused primarily on the responses of migratory songbird populations to forest management practices. His findings have demonstrated the importance of studying full-season productivity (nest productivity and fledgling survival) for understanding relationships among habitat features, individual fitness, and population productivity. After completing his Ph.D. in late 2010, Henry led a study of Golden-winged Warbler demography, the results of which are rewriting habitat management plans for that species of high conservation concern and providing insights into the adaptive significance of songbird nest-site choice. Henry is currently a National Science Foundation (NSF) Postdoctoral Research Fellow sponsored by the University of Tennessee, an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, and a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. He is leading a broadly collaborative, range-wide study of migratory connectivity to inform a full-cycle conservation plan for the Golden-winged Warbler. As part of his NSF fellowship, Henry is also building upon his commitment to outreach. He is passionate about broadening participation in science by underrepresented groups, a passion demonstrated by his work with the White Earth Academy of Math and Science at Gaawaabaabiganikaag (White Earth Indian Reservation) in Minnesota. In receiving this award, Henry would like to acknowledge the role of his graduate advisors, close collaborators, and many field assistants in making him look good.
Christina (Christie) Riehl's research focuses on the evolution of mating systems in birds, especially in little-known tropical species. She began working in the Neotropics as an undergraduate at Harvard University, when she studied the nesting behavior of Black-headed Trogons (Trogon melanocephalus) in a seasonally dry forest in Costa Rica. For her Ph.D. work at Princeton University, Christie studied the unusual breeding system of the Greater Ani (Crotophaga major), a South American cuckoo that nests in communal groups. Each group consists of several socially monogamous adult pairs, which cooperate to build a single, shared nest in which all the females lay their eggs. Although all the adults participate in incubation and parental care of the mixed clutch, not all aspects of the anis' behavior are “cooperative.” In fact, females within the group compete with each other for reproduction by removing each other's eggs from the communal nest. Christie's dissertation work showed that although breeding in a communal group is costly for females, the benefits of cooperative nest defense are sufficiently high to outweigh these costs. Using microsatellite genotyping methods developed with the help of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, she was able to confirm earlier suspicions that adult Greater Anis in cooperative nesting groups are not genetically related to one another. Interestingly, female anis can also act as nest parasites, “dumping” their eggs in the nests of neighboring groups and providing no subsequent parental care. Therefore, a related goal of Christie's research is to understand how cooperative and parasitic strategies can coexist in a single population, and how these strategies evolve over time. After receiving her Ph.D. in 2011, Christie was awarded a postdoctoral research fellowship by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute to continue working on the color-banded study population of Greater Anis that she established during her dissertation work. She is currently a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University and has joined Scott Edwards's lab. Christie would like to thank the members and board of the Cooper Ornithological Society for their continued encouragement and support of young ornithologists.
