Danielle Salcido

*Too funny :)

To funny! Thank you so much Wayne!!!! Thank you for your commitment to our projects!

Thanks Ron! Yes I was very happy to learn that we had extended time! If I succeed I can honestly say it wouldn't have been without your contribution. Thanks, for watching the progress of this campaign and rooting for us to its end.

Hope you meet your goal and my little bit helps. After seeing your pledge to my project I was able to find you, and equally love the work your lab does. I found many parallels between you and I had to support your project, Meera: I too was formerly a teacher and I work with Earthwatch Citizen science on our project. I found that inspiring that we both jumped into the world of academia to pursue a PhD and make sure to incorporate the public into our work! Good luck.

Nicole! Glad you asked that because I didn't make that part clear. You can use them in the tropics (and we have before), but there are a few issues in the tropics to consider, that can make beat sheets less useful for what we need to do, but could still work in other cases: 1) First and foremost for our project (which catalogues interaction data), we need to ensure accurate caterpillar-host plant associations. Thus, we need to use methods that give us confidence a caterpillar came from a particular host-plant. In the tropics, vegetation is dense and plants are intertwined with each other. In that case, if we use a beat sheet, it would be hard to make a host plant association with certainty because we would not be able to determine from which plant it came. 2) Understory plants in the tropics include a lot of shrubs and young trees with few very large leaves, or are vines that are intertwined with other plants. In these cases, it is just more efficient to look under the leaves. A beat sheet could be destructive and cumbersome for plants like these. In temperate regions, in the sites I have collected, you come across relatively large and dense shrubs (e.g. Ceanothus or rabbitbrush) or trees (e.g. oaks and juniper) and beat sheets work great for these because you can hit a large area of a single plant and the robust branches will hold up to the beat sheet method. 3) It is very wet in the tropics, and beat sheets are most efficient when you can gently shake of the debris to reveal caterpillars stuck to the sheet using their prolegs. If the canvas beat sheet is wet, debris sticks and it just makes it tough to reveal caterpillars. 4) Many caterpillars we find in Costa Rica are shelter builders. These roll up leaves. a beat sheet is unlikely to work on many of these and you do not need a beat sheet to spot them. 5) Bullet ants! In Costa Rica this is an issue to consider when using beat sheet methods. 6) The first time I used a beat sheet I was in the tropics (Ecuador). We used it to hit Chusquea (bamboo. For tropical plants, like Chusquea that dominate an area, the beat sheet method can work. This is also true for many plants in dry tropical forests. . Hope this helped clarify the many uses of beat sheets!

I tried changing the settings. Can you let me know if it worked? Thanks.