It’s not just fish being studied at SAFS. Undergraduates get to learn about a huge range of species, from teeny tiny parasites and insects, to seabirds and the largest mammals on Earth. And it’s not just animals either. It’s all the habitats in which these animals live and depend on. For Stevan Pekich, birds are his thing. “I have always been a huge fan of birds and have done as much as possible to integrate them as much as I could into my SAFS major,” he said. Stevan is an undergraduate in his senior year, double majoring in SAFS and Environmental Science. “This led me to working on Giordano (Gio) Jacuzzi’s project within the Olden Lab last year where I was helping identify bird calls.” Using the skills he picked up while volunteering on Gio’s project, Stevan is now working with Gio as his partner and mentor on his capstone project.
For Stevan’s capstone project, which is the final research step for an undergraduate before majoring in aquatic and fishery sciences, he is exploring how urbanization and insect health are affecting riparian-obligate bird species in our local King County. “Riparian habitat refers to transitional areas between land and water, such as rivers and streams. Riparian habitat typically includes rich soil, lush vegetation, and abundant aquatic insect populations that are important for many species,” Stevan said. “Riparian-obligate species are ones that require riparian habitat at some point in their life history, such as for nesting or foraging, and are often heavily affected by destruction or degradation of riparian areas.”
Stevan’s research includes species such as Willow Flycatchers and Wilson’s warblers that rely on riparian areas for habitat and insects to eat. He is examining if the health of insects and level of urbanization are affecting whether or not these birds are visiting King County’s riparian habitat. Although only 2% of King County is classed as riparian habitat, over 50% of the wildlife in Western Washington use riparian habitat frequently.
Visiting 30 different sites in the summer of 2024 along streams in King County, Stevan and Gio set up microphones to gather acoustic recordings. These acoustic devices were scheduled to record periodically during the times of the day that birds are most vocal. “The sites represented a gradient of high-low levels of insect health measured by the King County Department of Natural Resources, as well as a gradient of high-low levels of urbanization measured using GIS tools and datasets to identify impervious areas around each site,” Stevan said. The term high-low levels means the sites represent a range of insect health and diversity, ranging from poor levels where there are low levels of insect health to high levels where aquatic insect species are abundant. And the same for urbanization: high urbanization refers to sites with a high percentage of impervious surfaces and low urbanization meaning there is not much impervious surface around the site.
After the summer monitoring period was over, Stevan returned to collect each of the acoustic recording units, with the next step to conduct a deep dive into the audio data. “Using a model that is able to parse through the recordings and pick out and identify bird calls, one of my tasks is to make sure the model is accurately identifying the calls,” Stevan said. “To do this, I will be going in and manually listening to a few of the segments to make sure at least one of each bird species identified is present at each site.” Currently working on this stage of the project, we wondered how Stevan was able to identify which bird made which call. “I am able to identify the birds by their calls by looking at the spectrogram of the call and comparing it to known spectrograms of other recordings. I compare the shape and range of frequency of the spectrogram and can determine from there the species,” he shared. “Many bird species have multiple different calls and sounds that they make, so this can be a bit time consuming if I have to search through all the different types of songs and chirps.”
The findings of Stevan’s research—i.e. what birds were present where, and how many—will be important in the conservation and restoration of riparian habitat and riparian-obligate species. “Knowing just how much urbanization and insect health are contributing to habitat usage will be key in gauging success in stream restoration projects and riparian-obligate conservation plans,” Stevan shared. One of the programs Stevan and Gio came across in their background research was the King County Small Habitat Restoration Program, which restores streams by planting native vegetation, removing fish migration barriers, and removing invasive plants.
The capstone projects available to undergraduates completing their majors at SAFS are vast and varied. They also present a wide array of opportunities from working in the field on data collection to working in the lab on data analysis. For Stevan, his favorite part was the fieldwork. “I really enjoyed being able to go out into streams around King County to set up the microphones. Even though it got a bit thorny bushwhacking through blackberries, it was very cool to see the shift from how very urbanized streams look versus more natural and pristine ones, and what sort of vegetation and wildlife was there,” he said. “Also, being a huge birder, I was definitely a fan of listening to the bird recordings we got—it was like bird watching in 30 different places at once over a whole summer.”
One piece of advice we hear time and time again from students who have studied at SAFS is to make use of the academic and advising resources available, which provide connections and networking opportunities that lead to research. “The advising and academic resources available to me are what led me to find prior research opportunities that have helped me pursue my capstone. Building knowledge in quantitative analyses and ecological processes has been especially helpful throughout my capstone,” Stevan said. “With my double major, I feel that each makes me more specialized and able to pursue research and career opportunities in a variety of different fields in both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.”
So, what’s next for Stevan when he graduates in Spring? “I hope to move back home to Anchorage, Alaska where I grew up to pursue a career in natural resource management. I know that my experiences in SAFS have made me uniquely qualified for many of the management projects in Alaska and I’m excited to get started with managing terrestrial and aquatic resources. My capstone has helped me a lot with developing some of the technical skills with GIS and quantitative analyses via R-Studio that will be applicable to a career in natural resources,” he said.
Working with Gio and working on his own capstone project is not the only research experience that Stevan has been involved in while an undergraduate at SAFS. “Last summer I was an intern with Defenders of Wildlife helping on their conceptual plan to reintroduce southern sea otters to northern California and Oregon,” Stevan shared. “ I think that being in SAFS really set me apart from the other applicants, as the role required working with commercial fishery catch and species data. I have found that this internship has set me up for success as I am pursuing career opportunities up in Alaska, and I owe a large part of that to the opportunities and experiences I pursued in SAFS!”
Curious to read what other undergraduates are up to during their studies? Check out their stories: