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Taza Schaming

Taza Schaming entered the MS/Ph.D. program in Natural Resources in fall 2007.   After graduating from Tufts University with a Biology degree in June 2001, Taza has spent the past few years performing field research, traveling, living and working throughout the world.  She has worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Department (USFWS) and Point Reyes Bird Observatory (PRBO), studying birds and their habitat. With the USFWS, she performed waterbird surveys, breeding bird censuses, point counts and habitat assessments.  With PRBO, she camped and worked in the sagebrush habitat of Wyoming.  Her research included comparing territory size and distribution, abundance, fertility, and predation rates between specific species in the untouched Bureau of Land Management land and in the natural gas fields.  She has also performed biological research in other positions: rehabilitating birds of prey in Villa Tunari, Bolivia; carrying out a self-designed study of altitudinal variations of dominant tree species in Tanzania; injecting Drosophila (fruit fly) embryos for transgenic research at Tufts University; and studying Ambystomatidae (mole salamander) species with drift fence and pitfall traps in a Massachusetts woodland.  Taza has also worked as a field technician for Environmental Compliance Services, a consulting company, where she primarily focused on hydrology and soil analysis, as well as maintaining and troubleshooting remediation systems.

Taza is passionate about field research, and in her graduate work, looks forward to immersion in intensive ornithological field work: researching bird ecology, studying reproductive success, the evolution of social behavior, cooperative breeding and habitat. She plans to focus on ornithology, but her enthusiasm extends to observing and studying the interdependence of the ecology of the surrounding ecosystems. 

Teaching/Support

Taza has been awarded the CALS fellowship for her first year at Cornell.

Papers

TBA