Jodi Sedlock, assistant professor of biology, is a wildlife ecologist whose research interests focus on the ecology, community organization, and conservation of tropical bats, specifically those that feed on insects, as opposed to those that eat fruit or fish. She has conducted field research around the world, most frequently in the Philippines, home to 75 species of bats and a place she considers “her second home” after making a dozen trips there in the past decade.
With the support of a $28,000 AsiaNetwork Freeman Student-Faculty Collaborative Research Fellowship, Sedlock spent ten weeks this past summer camping with four students — Laura Corcoran, ’04, Shi-Hsia Hwa, ’05, Ben Pauli, ’06, and Marin Damerow, ’07 — on Mount Isarog on the Philippine island of Luzon. In addition to systematically surveying the area’s bat community, Sedlock and her students created illustrated posters and pamphlets to help local citizens better understand the benefits of bats and their role in the regional ecology. The pamphlets and banners were written in Bicolano and Tagalog, two dialects, and featured hand-drawn artwork of nearly a dozen species of bats. “Art speaks in a wide range of languages and helps communicate in a friendly, effective way,” Sedlock explains. “It’s important that research gets communicated to the people whose daily decisions will most affect the threatened areas.”
Sedlock presented “Habitat structure and resource heterogeneity influence bat coexistence” at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point last fall and “A multifaceted approach for sampling bat communities in the Philippines: a field test on Mount Banahaw” earlier this year for a meeting of the Wildlife Conservation Society of the Philippines.
Pictured with Professor Sedlock is Rob Klavins, ’05, who is studying the effects of land use along the Fox River on bird diversity.
Read more about Professor Sedlock
View other faculty profiles from the president's annual report