Summer 2017

Newsletter Archive

Local Coordinator Profile: Tyne Baker

Biologist, Bioacoustician and Science Communicator.

Growing up in rural Canada instilled a love of our natural history that fuels my passion for conservation. In addition to camping, fishing and swimming at every opportunity, I spent many hours studying critters, plants, and minerals. Often collecting items my mother would have preferred I'd left outdoors. I have always been delighted to learn about and share the wonder of nature and science. For this reason, I was excited to join Miistakis as a coordinator for the Call of the Wetland citizen science project. This project seeks to get Calgarians out in their community to survey wetlands for amphibians and learn more about biodiversity in an urban environment.

In addition to my interest in communicating with humans, I have been studying animal communication behaviours for over 7 years. These studies started with learning about birdsong in the academic arena, but have evolved to a complex review of vocal species (primarily birds, bats and amphibians) in the industrial and non-profit environmental sector. As a quality control, we have incorporated acoustic monitoring into Call of the Wetland. We will record animal sounds at a small subset of the wetlands. We will review these recordings in visualization software that allows us to read graphs of sound similar to musical staffs. Here we will denote each amphibian species' unique calls and compare to our volunteers' observations. This will add strength to any recommendations based on our broader-scale citizen science findings.

I am looking forward to a great summer with Miistakis supporting this fantastic program. If you are interested in Call of the Wetland or would like to ask me some questions in person, please see www.callofthewetland.ca for more information and to sign up as a volunteer citizen scientist.