Alexzandrea DePue

I graduated from UAA in the summer of 2019 with my BS in Biology and Psychology. From my undergraduate career I gained a variety of experiences ranging from learning about data entry from my time as an intern at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to wrangling fish as a fish technician on JBER. I even worked on a project looking at little brown bat behavior in Portage Valley as well as got to take part in a roost count on JBER. From my undergrad I jumped right into the Biological Sciences master’s program here at UAA working with Dr. Douglas Causey on seabirds.

For my graduate work I am looking at the recent patterns of change in Beringian food webs using seabirds as indicators. The hopes for this study is to be able to estimate the nature of change in the low Arctic (Western Aleutians) for the past decade through stable isotopes analysis of Arctic seabirds. Looking at how seabird’s isotope ratios are changing can give us insight into how their diets might be changing. Observing these changes can help determine how the food web might be changing. By doing this research I hope to be able to add to the information known about how variation in climate impacts the environment as well as the animals who depend on those ecosystems. With my career in biology I hope to improve our knowledge about organisms and their habitats. The more knowledge we have about ecosystems the better we will be at conserving those habitats and the animals that require them.