Week 4 Research Overview and Research Articles

Chrysafis, E. E. (2019). Assessing human attention as a reinforcer for dog behavior: A methodological comparison (Order No. 27548936). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I. (2325421019). Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/assessing-human-attention-as-reinforcer-dog/docview/2325421019/se-2.

I found this article on my school library website by searching for the name of the author. I got to know E.E. Chrysafis from Twitter and I was amazed that I actually found her article online. Here is the link to her Twitter homepage! I put her name in UCSB library website searching and many articles under her name pop up. The one I chose is Assessing Human Attention as a Reinforcer for Dog Behavior: A Methodological Comparison. I chose this article because it is about dogs' behavior and my chosen animal is the coyote. The dogs and coyotes share a common ancestor and many similarities. Another reason why I chose this article is simply I like dogs! It did not take me too long to find this article because searching by author's name is an efficient technique. Another tip to find the article you want is to add a keyword after the author's name. It will narrow down the search results even more.

Chrysafis believes that a dog's behavior plays a big role when getting adopted. The dog that interacts with humans more would have a higher chance of getting adopted. Chrysafis implemented two methods, single operant and concurrent operant. Eight dogs participated in this research and six of them showed a difference between the methods, which proved that humans' attention will depends on the dog's behavior.

This study helped us better understand how animals relate to humans. Humans tend to like the animals that interact with them more. The animals are acting as friends and even family members to humans. If the animals love the humans, the humans would love them back.

It would be a little bit difficult to make this article a scicomm because this article is 62 pages long and it would be challenging to summarize them all. However, if I decided to choose this article, I would set the dogs in a shelter and a human who is looking to adopt a dog. I will describe their interaction and how different methods affect that person's feelings toward the dogs.

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Richard K.K. Huang, Quinn M.R. Webber, Michel P. Laforge, Alec L. Robitaille, Maegwin Bonar, Juliana Balluffi-Fry, Sana Zabihi-Seissan, and Eric Vander Wal. 2021. Coyote (Canis latrans) diet and spatial co-occurrence with woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou). Canadian Journal of Zoology. 99(5): 391-399. https://doi.org/10.1139/cjz-2020-0253

I found this article by searching the keyword "coyote" in Google Scholar. This is my first time using Google Scholar and I'm still getting familiar with everything. This article took me a while to find because the keyword "coyote" is too broad. I was looking for an article that fit my own research and also grab my attention. I chose this article because the animal I chose for this class is coyote and I would love to learn more about them.

This article is about the relationship between coyotes and caribou and why is their co-occurrance. The research took place in Fogo Island, Newfoundland, and Labrador. The research group use GPS to collect telemetry data on Caribou, and collect coyote scat and process it to find out the secret behind that relationship. They also use spatial analysis, model selection, and validation to better understanding the result.

The result of this research is expected. The primary diet of coyotes are caribou, which makes up 45.7% of their diet. However, it is interesting to find out there are also 15.5% of coyotes diet is from plants. The caribous have a habit to change forest in Summer and Winter, and it is most likely the coyotes and the caribous exist in the same forest during Summer and Winter. Since the caribous are moving constantly, the possibility of their co-occurrence is relatively low. This article told us the relationship between animals are very depending on the seasons. The animals must developed different surviving strategies in different seasons.

I think I can make this article a story and write it into a scicomm article. The article is relatively short and the findings are easy to understand. I would make the coyotes and the caribous as my protagonist because we are trying to find out their relationships in the nature.