KARA defends!

On July 15th Kara successfully defended her thesis on “Climate, Weather and Small Mammal Population Dynamics in a Northern Grassland”. The backbone of the project was the 25+ year data set on small mammal communities collected through senior wildlife students in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences. In addition, Kara compared ‘grassland mice’ and ‘forest mice’ to understand how they each were able to tolerate the extreme heat of the semi-arid grasslands surrounding Kamloops. Through that work, she detected the /Columbia Plateau Pocket Mouse, a species not seen in the entire region for over 70 years (see Atkinson & Larsen, 2025, Western Wildlife). Kara has now embarked on a PhD project focusing on snakes. Congratu