Collecting data in a very grassy meadow in Belleplain State Forest
Rosy Tucker is a senior majoring in Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources. She first started working in Dr. Rachael Winfree's lab as a Sophomore in the Aresty Research Assistant program. Her first project involved looking at the relationship between flower morphology and the morphologies of bees that visit them.
A bumblebee visiting Spiraea at an abandoned cranberry bog in Jackson, New Jersey.
She has been involved in the Winfree lab ever since working as a field technician during the summer and working on independent research during the school year. Since last year, her research focus has shifted to exploring landscape level predictors of the presence of rare bee species at a site. She is currently working on a G.H. Cook Thesis entitled "The Landscape Ecology of Rare Bees in New Jersey". She will be using a large dataset of over 10,000 bee visits to compare the presence of rare bees in natural and agricultural sites that have varying amounts of natural habitat available in the surrounding landscape.