Bradly J. Boner | Photography

Forest fire invertebrate impact study

University of Oklahoma principal investigator Hayley Lanier and biology undergrad Robert Beers catalogue a vole caputred in one of the study plots. Researchers work long hours in the field, coming out to the site three times in the summer for a week each. Four of those nights are spent trapping small mammals and invertebrates and one trip is devoted entirely to studying vegetation. Each morning they fanned out across the landscape, painstakingly checking 100 live traps and tagging, recording data on and releasing small animal after small animal. Lanier said the summer of 2015 was a particularly grueling year. “Between 20 and 50 percent of our traps had animals in them every single day, which was huge,” she said. “We were all exhausted.”

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University of Oklahoma principal investigator Hayley Lanier and biology undergrad Robert Beers catalogue a vole caputred in one of the study plots. Researchers work long hours in the field, coming out to the site three times in the summer for a week each. Four of those nights are spent trapping small mammals and invertebrates and one trip is devoted entirely to studying vegetation. Each morning they fanned out across the landscape, painstakingly checking 100 live traps and tagging, recording data on and releasing small animal after small animal. Lanier said the summer of 2015 was a particularly grueling year. “Between 20 and 50 percent of our traps had animals in them every single day, which was huge,” she said. “We were all exhausted.”