Ariana Harari

Analyzing Data for the New York City Audubon's Harbor Heron Monitoring Program and Coordinating SEANet Volunteers

Ariana Harari is a senior at Wheaton College, where she studies Biology with an emphasis on Environmental Science and Ecology. A touchstone for her interest in biology occurred during a vacation in Aruba when she was 15 years old. "It was my first experience with a tropical location and I fell in love it," Harari explains. "It was my first introduction to life below the surface of the water and I received my scuba license during that trip."

Harari also spent a student semester abroad in studies at the James Cook University in Australia. From those early experiences and recent studies, her passion for marine life has grown into an exploration of environmental conservation, perhaps with a focus on marine life, marine birds in areas of protection and/or management.

During her summer WT internship, Harari evaluated certain aspects of the Harbor Heron database, a resource that has been collected over the past 20-plus years by New York City Audubon. In 2005, conservation organizations and resource agencies in the New York region have become increasingly interested in the effects that cormorants may have on the habitats and on successful breeding of wading birds in the NY Harbor, and this is an additional aspect of the database that Harari most carefully evaluated.

E.J. McAdams, Executive Director of New York City Audubon, says, "Ariana provided an invaluable service by putting our year by year data into one package that will allow future researches to analyze trends within the data."

Harari's specific work included entering data collected by New York City Audubon regarding the changing harbor islands from the early 1980s - present, and creating graphs and a database, so the data can be easily accessed and analyzed.

Harari says, "It's a study that spans more than 20 years, which is pretty cool. We'll provide the data to NYC Audubon, create a link to the Harbor Heron project, which will show the shifting population totals of birds, population diversity, and location mapping of where they've been over time."

Harari also worked with the SEANET database. SEANET, the Seabird Ecological Assessment Network, is a program initiated by Tufts Veterinary School, recently expanded into Connecticut, New York and New Jersey. The program brings together interdisciplinary researchers and volunteers in a long-term collaborative effort to identify threats to marine birds in the northeastern US and Atlantic Canada. She entered data to spreadsheets, organized volunteers and developed a volunteer appreciation certificate.

Dr. Elbin explains the importance of the work, "Ariana's work is being completed during a critical time for the Harbor Heron's project fieldwork is ongoing right now and decisions are being made about future data collection protocols. Her summaries will help the managers decide on timing and methods of future surveys. And with SEANET, we're moving into a stage where the volunteers will be typing their data directly into an electronic database on the web rather than filling out spreadsheets for someone else to transcribe. Ariana is bringing us up to date on the backlog of manually entered data."

Dr. Newman adds, "We plan to use the analyses from Ariana's work to educate interested parties on the ecology of cormorants in relation to wading birds, and how these species are interacting on the islands in the New York Harbor. Ultimately, this information will be used to develop a long-term monitoring plan for the relationship between cormorants and wading birds."

Harari says of her summer, "I had never worked in the field before and I really didn't know what's available for study in New York City. I'm a New Yorker and I thought I'd have to move away after graduation for fieldwork. This summer has been eye opening because I see possibilities right here at home that I didn't know were available before."