Lou Pech, Assistant Professor of Bio-logical Sciences
What is your educational background?
My undergraduate degree was obtained at UW-Stevens Point in biology. When I took my undergraduate genetics class, I became very interested in the biochemistry of gene expression. I went to graduate school for biochemistry at UW-Madison. My Ph.D work concerned ciliary motility in protozoa. After that, I was a postdoctoral researcher in entomology at UW-Madison where I studied insect immunity. I am interested in insects because they are vectors for parasitic diseases.
What research have you completed in the past and how has that influenced your current work?
When I was a postdoctoral researcher, I worked in a lab that employed both biochemists and ecologists. I became interested in insect diversity and ecology. When I got my first teaching job, I taught invertebrate zoology and I learned to do field work. I then volunteered for a project in Utah in 2001 which studied the effects of off-road vehicles in a national park. Many insect specimens were being collected. Working on that project became my main research focus. I participated in a biodiversity inventory of beetles and wasps in the canyon where the project was located. The researchers I worked with already had trapping sites set up, so it involved going into the backcountry and collecting the specimens. In the lab, I spent a lot of time in front of a microscope identifying insects in the traps. We then analyzed this data to look for patterns over time.
What conclusions were reached as a result of the biodiversity inventory?
First, we identified the range of several species that had not been seen in Utah before. That information will soon be published. We also showed that different parts of the canyon have distinct beetle communities living in them. Over the seven-year period of the study, some of them have changed a great deal whereas one beetle community has remained stable.
What is the current status of the project?
The project has been added on to the much larger Colorado Plateau All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory that will survey national parks all over the Colorado plateau. It’s a similar project but in a different context, coordinated at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Ariz.
Currently I am putting information I already have into the new database. We’ve decided to focus on ground beetles, rather than all of them. This summer, I will be working to identify species of this beetle.
What colleagues or team members are you working with?
My main colleague is Tim Graham at the U.S. Geological Survey in Moab, Utah. I’ve also been working with Michael Gates at the USDA. The Colorado Plateau All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory has many new researchers working on it from different museums out west.
What potential applications do biodiversity inventories have in your discipline?
National parks are charged with preserving and protecting the natural systems within the park. In order to do that, you must know what’s there. There is very little known about insect diversity in many of our national parks. The main application is to have a database for parks to know what exactly it is they’re preserving.
Further Reading
Pech, L.L., Gates, M.W. and Graham, T.B. (2011) Dirhinus texanus (Hymenoptera: Chalcididae) From Utah. The Southwestern Naturalist. 56: 276-277.
Pech, L.L. and Graham, T.B. (2007) SCIENTIFIC NOTE: The First State Record for Trichiorhyssemus riparius (Horn) (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae: Aphodiinae) from Utah. Coleopterist Bulletin 61: 567.
Pech, L.L., Graham, T.B., Demark, H. and Mathis, J. Beetles of Salt Creek Canyon, Canyonlands National Park, UT. In The Colorado Plateau II: Biophysical, Socioeconomic, and Cultural Research. (c. van Riper III and D.J. Mattson, eds.) University of Arizona Press, 2005.