Benjamin Duncan Email & Phone Number

Kansas City, Mo, Us

Belton, Missouri, United States

Liberty, Missouri, United States

Columbia, Missouri, United States

Kansas City, Missouri, United States

Columbia, Missouri, United States

In this internship, I worked with the Missouri Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit to assist in helping the Missouri Department of Conservation with crayfish field sampling in the Ozark streams of southeast Missouri. I used a variety of tools and field methods (such as seins, traps, quadrats, and GPS units) to collect crayfish distributional data throughout the study. The three main objectives that we worked on to complete were to determine the current distribution of the invasive Woodland Crayfish in the St. Francis River drainage, refine and update distributional knowledge of the endemic Big Creek Crayfish and St. Francis River Crayfish, including verifying and updating past distributional models, and use updated distributional data with past distributional data to estimate rate of spread of invasive Woodland Crayfish and provide a temporal foundation for recovery and management plans. The reason we were completing these objectives for this study was to figure out the invasion rate of the Woodland Crayfish and the changes in the distribution of two native crayfish species in the upper St. Francis River Drainage. The research knowledge learned and gained from this study will be used to provide current and comprehensive distributional records for the invasive (Woodland Crayfish) and the native crayfishes (St. Francis River Crayfish and Big Creek Crayfish) proposed for federal listing, define the leading edges of the invasion in all known invaded streams, and produce more accurate estimates of invasion rates and native declines. This information is essential to setting up future management plans and for recovery planning to identify potential refugia where natives occur and the invasive has not yet reached within the river drainage. Without this study of crayfish, we could very well see the extinction of two important native species to the St. Francis River.

Liberty, Missouri

Kansas City, Missouri

Natural Resources Science And Management, Wildlife And Fisheries

Activities and Societies: Marching Mizzou, Forestry Club, Student Association of Fire Ecology, Society of American Foresters, Ducks.

Education record

Activities and Societies: National Honors Society, A+ Program, Technology Education Association of Missouri, Marching Band, Football, Track