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Boris with anesthetised fossa
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Coming from my home country to the United States for my
graduate study in 2002, I am currently an international
student in the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth
Sciences at Duke University.
I was born in 1971 and grew up in Taiwan. After finished
my two-year mandatory military service, I came to the United
State for my undergraduate study at the Ohio State University
in 1994 and got my B.A. degree of business in 1998. After
that, I went back to Taiwan and worked full-time for Nikon,
Corp. In my spare time, I was also a free-lance photojournalist.
Found out my best interest in nature and wildlife, I decided
to switch my direction to the other field, which I can devote
my lifetime and work on it. Right now, I am pursuing my
master program of conservation ecology at Nicholas School.
My best interest is the conservation of wildlife in tropical
forests. In the long run, I would like to work for NGO whose
projects require more scientific research for mammiferous
carnivore in the field.
Having a great internship experience of summer 2003, I
assisted Luke Dollar for his splendid research program of
the biggest carnivore, Cryptoprocta ferox (fossa), in Madagascar
and also collected fossa’s trapping and physical data for
my master project. Meanwhile, I conducted the ground-survey
of the vegetation types around the Ankarafantsika National
Park by using the GPS to fix the coordinates and the digital
camera to document the image database. These coordinate
and photographic data will then be used to compare to satellite
imageries and perform a supervised classification of land
cover type in the area. The final goal of my master project
is to nail down the available habitat of fossa in Ankarafantsika
so that I will be able to predict the population size of
the animal in that region.
If possible, don’t miss your chance to visit Madagascar.
The people, the exotic culture and the glamorous primates
and endemic species all compose the harmonious pictures
in this African island. On the other side of the earth now,
I still dream about Madagascar…
