Cagan H Sekercioglu

Stanford University
California
USA, Turkey

www.naturalphotos.com

Cagan Sekercioglu is a Turkish avian ecologist and nature photographer doing his postdoctoral research at the Stanford University Center for Conservation Biology. Cagan came to the US in 1993 to study at Harvard University, from where he received degrees in biology and anthropology. As an undergraduate, Cagan studied birds in Colorado and Australia in 1995, and for his undergraduate thesis, in Kibale National Park of Uganda in 1996. After college, he studied birds in Alaska for the US government in 1997 and got travel grants to observe and photograph birds around the world for a year. He visited all the continents and about 30 countries before starting his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1998. His field work took him to Costa Rica where he studied the effects of habitat fragmentation on forest birds, receiving his Ph.D. in 2003.

Cagan's research focuses on the causes and consequences of bird extinctions around the world. He investigates ecological factors behind the extinction-proneness of certain groups, such as tropical understory insectivores, and the consequences of these extinctions on bird-mediated ecosystem processes and services, such as pollination, seed dispersal and control of insect outbreaks. Cagan is also searching for ways to increase the contribution of ecotourism, especially birdwatching, to community-based conservation in the tropics and to improve the role of the private sector in the conservation of biodiversity to prevent extinctions and consequent collapses of critical ecosystem processes.

Abstracts of his research papers can be seen on http://jasper1.stanford.edu/~cagan/abstracts.htm and examples of his photography are on http://naturalphotos.com/

• First material posted on 15 January 2003
• Number of videos posted: 63 covering 55 species (0.55%)
• Number of photos posted: 0 covering 0 species (0%)
• Number of sounds posted: 0 covering 0 species (0%)