Congratulations to the winners of the 2022 Journal of Zoology “Paper of the Year” award: Alyssa Giordano, Louis Hunninck and Michael Sheriff.

Their paper, “Prey Responses to Predation Risk under Chronic Road Noise,” addresses the increasingly significant issue for wildlife today, anthropogenic noise, through an experiment that tested for differences in foraging and vigilance behavior of small mammals when exposed to either predation risk or road noise alone, or predation risk concurrent with road noise. With its innovative design, this is one of the first studies to concurrently examine the effects of road noise and predation risk on free-living prey, and the results of their study are fascinating.

The link to the paper can be found here: https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jzo.12968

The lead author on the paper, Alyssa Giordano, graduated with a B.S. in Marine Biology in 2021. This work was done under the supervision and mentorship of Michael Sheriff, Associate Professor of Biology at UMassD. During her time at UMassD, Alyssa had funding support from the Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) and presented her work at the 2021 UMass Undergraduate Research Conference (Mass URC).

Kudos to Alyssa, and her co-authors!