I am Harrison Jones, a first year graduate student at the University of Florida. I have a long-term passion for ornithology, and recent experiences as a field assistant in Peru, California, and Puerto Rico have helped confirm and shape my interests. Broadly speaking, I am interested in the behavioral ecology and conservation behavior of avian systems, specifically inter-specific communication. I am especially interested in carrying out field-based research examining the effects of interspecific behaviors such as mixed-species flocking, mobbing and alarm calling, and heterospecific attraction on landscape use and demography.
In particular, the evolution of community-wide facilitative behaviors, such as the mobbing calls of chickadees, and their ability to mediate fear-based landscape use, is of great interest. I am also interested in studying fragmented Andean and Southern temperate habitats, and would like to compare these systems with Holarctic ecosystems, to look for similarities in the origins of community facilitation. South temperate ecosystems contain many ecomorphological analogues to Northern temperate species, but it is unclear if the ‘communication web’ in such communities is also similar.
Harrison Jones 