LSU Museum of Natural Science researchers and research collaborators in Bolivia have authored the first field guide book to birds of Bolivia. “Bolivia is one of the richest countries in the world in terms of biodiversity,” said LSU Museum of Natural Science Curator of Birds and John S. McIlhenny Distinguished Professor J.V. Remsen, who is a co-author of Birds of Bolivia. The LSU Museum of Natural Science has the world’s largest collection of Bolivian birds, which is the backbone of data for the book and its illustrations. The field guide illustrates all 1,425 bird species of Bolivia and provides a concise synopsis of distribution, habitat, feeding behavior and diet, plumage variations, vocalizations, and behavior for each species, much of which was previously unpublished. Birds of Bolivia is also the first field guide to birds to apply computer algorithms called “ecological niche modeling” to map species distributions. These maps are more precise and objective than those in traditional field guides.

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One of the University’s newest faculty members is spearheading a mission to solve the mystery surrounding KIC 8462852, a star exhibiting unusual light patterns.

Assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University Tabetha Boyajian was the lead author of “Where’s the Flux?”, a research paper exploring the unusual light pattern of KIC 8462852. The team’s findings were published while Boyajian was conducting a post-doctoral fellowship at Yale University in 2015.

While Boyajian investigated the star, she didn’t actually discover it. She credits “Planet Hunters,” a part of the Citizen Science Alliance, for noticing the fluctuating data in the star’s light curve.

In Planet Hunters, more than 300,000 regular science enthusiasts are able to take part in research by observing data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft in order to discover exoplanets. The Planet Hunters monitor the drops in light of host stars, usually due to their orbiting extrasolar planets, and relies on human pattern recognition rather than a computer.

Boyajian said a machine would never have found KIC 8462852, simply because it wasn’t looking for it.

“It would be sitting there in the data set for decades forever because nobody was really looking for something like that,” she said. “It took the human eye to recognize it and say, ‘Hey, that’s different.’”

When the citizen observers were monitoring the brightness of certain stars, they noticed a giant drop in this star’s light, which couldn’t be attributed to an exoplanet. The light curve exhibited large dips, so much so that Boyajian originally thought the data was faulty. Whatever is blocking the star’s light has an area more than 1,000 times the area of Earth, Boyajian said in her February TED Talk.

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