Roxanne Santina Beltran

About

Roxanne Santina Beltran is a principal investigator at the Beltran Lab, where her research focuses on marine mammal biology, particularly northern elephant seals. Her work involves long-term monitoring and field research, including mark-recapture programs, behavioral studies, and habitat use analysis. She is interested in understanding the ecological and physiological aspects of pinnipeds, with a broader aim to explore population dynamics, reproductive strategies, and environmental interactions affecting these marine mammals.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Ecology
• Psychology
• Biology
• Law
• Medicine
• Social Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science

Selected publications

• Field courses narrow demographic achievement gaps in ecology and evolutionary biology

  Ecology and Evolution · 2020 · 115 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  = 570 students). We found no differences in the proportion of students matriculating at the university as undecided, proposed EEB, or proposed other majors across demographic groups. However, five years later, under-represented students were significantly less likely to graduate with EEB degrees, indicating retention rather than recruitment drives disparities in representation. This retention gap is partly due to a lower rate of college completion and partly through attrition to other majors. Al…

  DOI

• Anti-racist interventions to transform ecology, evolution and conservation biology departments

  Nature Ecology & Evolution · 2021 · 105 citations

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Brain activity of diving seals reveals short sleep cycles at depth

  Science · 2023 · 79 citations

  ) diving in Monterey Bay, California. Brain-wave patterns showed that seals took short (less than 20 minutes) naps while diving (maximum depth 377 meters; 104 sleeping dives). Linking these patterns to accelerometry and the time-depth profiles of 334 free-ranging seals (514,406 sleeping dives) revealed a North Pacific sleepscape in which seals averaged only 2 hours of sleep per day for 7 months, rivaling the record for the least sleep among all mammals, which is currently held by the African ele…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How Field Courses Propel Inclusion and Collective Excellence

  Trends in Ecology & Evolution · 2020 · 46 citations

  DOI

• Maximizing biological insights from instruments attached to animals

  Trends in Ecology & Evolution · 2024-10-30 · 20 citations

  reviewOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Instruments attached to animals ('biologgers') have facilitated extensive discoveries about the patterns, causes, and consequences of animal behavior. Here, we present examples of how biologging can deepen our fundamental understanding of ecosystems and our applied understanding of global change impacts by enabling tests of ecological theory. Applying the iterative process of science to biologging has enabled a diverse set of insights, including social and experiential learning in long-distance…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Rules of death across ontogeny in sexually dimorphic mammals

  NSF · $1.2M · 2021–2026

Frequent coauthors

• Amy L. Kirkham

  United States Fish and Wildlife Service

  37 shared

• Daniel P. Costa

  Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation

  33 shared

• Jennifer M. Burns

  Texas Tech University

  30 shared

• Arvind Varsani

  Arizona State University

  24 shared

• Jessica M. Kendall-Bar

  Scripps Institution of Oceanography

  21 shared

• Patrick W. Robinson

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  20 shared

• Michelle R. Shero

  Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

  15 shared

• Erika S. Zavaleta

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  14 shared

Labs

• Beltran LabPI

Similar researchers at University of California, Santa Cruz

• Beth Alison Shapiroh-89
• Auston Marmaduke Kilpatrickh-83
• John N Thompsonh-78