The location of UCSB is what brought Rebecca to the campus for her undergraduate work. Since her arrival, she's found working with faculty on research projects quite valuable.

Her main undergraduate project has been to study and model the interactions between bullfrogs and California red-legged frogs. Bullfrogs eat tadpole and sub-adult California red-legged frogs. Her model showed that bullfrogs and California red-legged frogs can coexist in a pristine habitat. When a habitat is disturbed, such as by cattle grazing or dams placement and regulation of stream flow the two types of frogs are less likely to be able to coexist. In such conditions it is always the California red-legged frogs that decrease in number.

She received a Research Training Grant (RTG) from NSF for the modeling portion of her project. She also received a grant from Vandenberg Airforce Base in 1998. These were wonderful opportunities as they allowed her to gain experience in both modeling and field work. It was also an excellent foot in the door for doing a Senior Honors Thesis. Last winter, she presented a poster on her research at the Western Section of the Wildlife Society, and won the award for best poster at this meeting. This is a meeting attended by professionals, not an undergraduate conference; thus the award would be a considerable achievement for a graduate student, and is outstanding for an undergraduate, according to Professor Roger Nisbet. She received the Bazzi Award from Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology when she graduated in June 2000. A paper, with her as first author, entitled "Bullfrogs, Catastrophes and the Persistence of California Red-Legged Frogs" was recently submitted to the peer-reviewed journal Conservation Biology.

Rebecca became interested in this project when she began working as a field assistant with graduate student Sue Christopher in Sam Sweet's lab. Sue studying California red-legged frogs on Vandenberg Air Force Base property. After working with Sue for about a year, she started her own project looking at interactions between California red-legged frogs and bullfrogs. Sam Sweet suggested that she do a modeling project using historic data from museum records and USGS stream flow data. She worked on this project with Eric Muller, Roger Nisbet and Sam Sweet.

She feels very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with so many wonderful people while at UCSB, Dr. Sweet, Dr. Nisbet, Sue Christopher, Eric Muller, and Mark Holmgren. She is very impressed by the fact that she, as an undergraduate, had the opportunity to participate in such a high-quality research experience.

She is currently working on a US Forest Service project studying mountain yellow-legged frogs in Kings Canyon. She is working with Kathleen Matthews and Karen Pope. She is applying to graduate schools in theoretical ecology and conservation biology programs. She would like to continue the work she has been doing: working with aquatic ecosystem models and modeling amphibian populations.