Chloe Chen-kraus is a graduate student from Yale University. She is just starting a research thesis on the “Impacts of human activity on sifakas at Béza Mahafaly.” One of the biggest challenges of this project is defining and quantifying “Impacts.” Chloe does this by monitoring specific animal behavior, abundance of animals, life history of specific individuals, and health by parasite number and nutrition. She monitors animal abundance by using an innovative method called distance sampling. Every two months, fifteen 500m transects of land is surveyed. At 50m intervals a recorded sifika “lost” call is used to find groups. Using a complex math model the responses of the transects can be use to extrapolate the total lemurs in a given area. Chloe mesuares specific animal behavior\life history by conducting scan sampling of two sifaka groups in parcel of heavily protected land and two sifaka groups from a sustainable use zone that allows limited use by the local community. In the future two new groups will be monitored in a region of newly protected land that use to be heavily used by the community. That last bit of recorded data is the level of disturbance; cut trees, burned land, zebu, sheep, goats, livestock dung, and people. The level of disturbance was high for all zones.
