People

Dr. Christopher Rota

I am interested in understanding factors that shape the spatial distribution of species, and the dynamic interplay between space use and demography. In addition to the conservation and management implications of addressing such questions, I also enjoy thinking hard about how to capture these processes with novel statistical techniques. As a quantitative ecologist, I am able to address these questions across broad taxonomic groups, and I have been able to work with diverse species including birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians.

Contact: christopher.rota 'at' mail.wvu.edu

PhD Students

Hannah Clipp

Hannah hails from Bel Air, Maryland, where she got her first taste of environmental research in high school as a student at the Science and Mathematics Academy. She earned two Bachelor’s degrees in Wildlife and Fisheries Resources and Multidisciplinary Studies from West Virginia University and a Master’s degree in Wildlife Ecology from the University of Delaware. As an undergraduate student, she conducted independent research on waterbird community ecology at created wetlands in West Virginia, the effects of recolonizing salmon on avian communities in Washington, and the impact of grassland management strategies on dickcissel spatial ecology in Kansas. For her Master’s thesis, she used data from weather surveillance radars to study songbird stopover ecology along the U.S. coast of the Gulf of Mexico in collaboration with the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Currently, Hannah is pursuing a Ph.D. in Natural Resources Science as a WVU Ruby Fellow and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Co-advised by Petra Wood, she is also a member of the WV Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit. Her dissertation research involves investigating long-term avian responses to climate and landscape change in the Appalachian Mountains, with a specific focus on forest songbird communities and species of conservation concern.

Hannah’s personal website: http://hannahclipp.weebly.com/

Twitter: @AllThatWildlife | Instagram: @allthatwildlife | Facebook: All That Wildlife

Lab publications:

Clipp, H.L., A.L. Evans, B.E. Kessinger, K. Kellner, and C.T. Rota. Accepted. A penalized likelihood for multispecies occupancy models improves predictions of species interactions. Ecology.

Brett Skelly

Brett grew up in the rural part of upstate NY called Pine City, NY. He grew up enjoying the outdoors in the woods, hunting and fishing. These childhood experiences sparked his interest in wildlife and their behavior. His interests led him to attend Unity College for his undergrad in Wildlife and Fisheries Management. He then worked a few internships before starting grad school.

His first internship included working as a ranch hand on a deer farm in Nooner Ranch in Hondo, TX. There he helped check deer pins for diseases and antler damages and assisted in bottle feeding over 250 fawns. His second internship involved work with the Michigan Predatory Prey Project. He worked as a vegetation technician collecting samples of available browses species for white-tailed deer. He also volunteered with the Unity College Bear Study, collecting bear locations and doing den checks.

Brett’s MS research consisted of evaluating the effects that natural gas and oil development have on mule deer survival and fawning locations in North Dakota.

Brett is currently Assistant Deer Biologist at the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources. His PhD research focuses on understanding white-tailed deer demography and resource selection in West Virginia.

Lab publications:

Skelly, B.P., K. Lewis, R. Tyl, G. Dimmig, and C.T. Rota. 2018. Occupancy models - multi-species. Pages 22-1 - 22-13 in E.G. Cooch and G.W. White, editors. Program MARK: A gentle introduction, 18th edition.

MS Students

Erin Morrison

Erin grew up in Virginia Beach and spent her formative years alternating between exploring the small strips of woods behinds her house and begging her parents to take her camping in the mountains. She attended Oregon State University and obtained an Honors Bachelor of Science in Biology. While working on her undergraduate degree, she also attended the Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation “Semester Away” program located at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Virginia. As an honors student at OSU, Erin completed an undergraduate thesis on tick ecology at the Cary Institute in New York, focusing on identifying tick blood meals using stable isotope analysis. She spent the next four years roaming across county, working on various projects involving martens, fishers, deer, wolves, and grizzly bears – and even took a detour to work in Panama with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

Currently, her graduate research involves investigating bobcat demography in the Black Hills, SD; she is co-advised by Dr. Chad Lehman from the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish, and Parks. Specifically, she is focused on understanding the factors that influence bobcat kitten survival and quantifying which habitat characteristics are used for den site selection. The demographic information obtained from this project will have important implications for the management of bobcats in South Dakota.

Sarah Pesi

Sarah grew up in Maryland and attended Frostburg State University to study Wildlife and Fisheries for her undergraduate degree. As an undergrad, she volunteered her time to help graduate students with their projects and developed an interest in wildlife research. She also conducted undergraduate research examining the diet of river otters at Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey. After graduating, she traveled around the county to work on different research projects with a variety of species including bats, spotted skunks, coyotes, badgers, and snowshoe hare.

For her M. S. research, she will be studying home range dynamics of white-tailed deer in West Virginia and estimating deer abundance using camera traps.

Undergraduate Students

Alums

Stephanie Augustine, MS, 2022

Stephanie's thesis, "Population and migratory ecology of Canada Warblers (Cardellina canadensis) in the central Appalachian Mountains, West Virginia, USA", built on the work of her predecessor, Gordon Dimmig, to quantify regional survival rates as a function of the environment and determine the nonbreeding season distribution of the West Virginia population of Canada Warblers. You can read more about the project here. During her three years as a graduate student at WVU, Stephanie served as a teaching assistant in the WVU Research Apprenticeship program mentoring undergraduate students across disciplines, and specialized in training undergraduates in her own lab to safely capture and band birds as part of Dr. Rota’s ongoing urban bird demography study. She also earned her graduate certificate in GIS and Spatial Analysis.

Prior to graduate school, Stephanie, a Pennsylvania native, received her Bachelor of Science in Biodiversity and Conservation Biology from Cedar Crest College in Allentown, PA. She then worked as a zookeeper and conservation educator for a few years before switching to fieldwork projects on everything from monarch butterflies in New Jersey to White-ruffed Manakins in Costa Rica.

Stephanie is currently an Avian Conservation Specialist with Ecostudies Institute in Olympia, WA, a nonprofit that focuses on prairie-oak habitats and the wildlife which depend on them.

Dr. Kenneth Kellner, Postdoctoral Fellow, 2018

Ken is a quantitative ecologist interested in population and agent-based modeling, ecosystem responses to disturbance, wildlife disease, and open-source tools for reproducible research. Ken's postdoc focused on how vertebrate populations are impacted by forest management, using a long-term dataset from the Missouri Ozark Forest Ecosystem Project (MOFEP).

Ken's Personal Website: https://kenkellner.com/

Contact: ken 'at' kenkellner.com

Ken is currently a staff scientist in Dr. Jerrold Belant's lab at SUNY ESF.

Lab Publications:

Kellner, K., A.W. Parsons, R. Kays, J.J. Millspaugh, and C.T. Rota. A two-species occupancy model with a continuous-time detection process reveals spatial and temporal interactions. Accepted. Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Statistics.

Kellner, K., R. Renken, J. Millspaugh, P. Porneluzi, A. Wolf, D. Fantz, R. Gitzen, J. Faaborg, S. Timm, S. Ehlers, M. Buchanan, J. Haslerig, A. George, and C.T. Rota. 2019. Effects of forest management on vertebrate communities: Synthesizing two decades of data. Ecological Applications 29:e01993.

Gordon Dimmig, MS, 2019

Gordon has been interested in wildlife for as long as he can remember. This broad interest eventually narrowed into a passion for birds. He studied environmental science at Juniata College, where his birding hobby was refined into a professional interest. An environmental science fellowship at Juniata allowed him to spend a summer in the Amazon rainforest of Peru where he assisted in mist netting and bird banding research. Following college, Gordon worked as a technician for the Wildlife Conservation Society. He conducted avian point count surveys in Adirondack bogs to examine long-term trends of several boreal species.

For his M.S. research, Gordon investigated breeding songbirds in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. He used occupancy modeling to determine the environmental correlates of the Canada Warbler in the southern extent of its range. Additionally, he used a 25-year historic dataset to understand the temporal dynamics of songbird communities on an elevation gradient.

Lab Publications:

Dimmig, G., C. Rota, P. Wood, and C. Lituma. Accepted. Understory structure and heterospecifics influence occupancy of a ground-nesting species of conservation concern, the Canada Warbler. Avian Conservation and Ecology.

Katharine Lewis, MS, 2018

My thesis had two components. The first examined wintering new world sparrow occupancy and habitat associations on West Virginia Agricultural Conservation Easement Program (ACEP) wetlands compared with wetlands that were located on public land in West Virginia. The second aspect involved vegetative and wetland feature assessments on the ACEP wetlands. Both of these components allowed me to evaluate the characteristics of the private wetland easements in terms of wetland features and wildlife habitat. My results indicate that the ACEP wetlands had similar features and provided similar wintering avian habitat as other wetlands located in the state.

Katharine is currently a Research Manager with Tin Mountain Conservation Center.

Lab Publications:

Lewis, K.E., C.T. Rota, and J.T. Anderson. 2020. A comparison of wetland characteristics between Agricultural Conservation Easement Program and public lands wetlands in West Virginia, USA. Ecology and Evolution 10:3017-3031.

Lewis, K.E., C.T. Rota, C.M. Lituma, and J.T. Anderson. 2019. Influence of the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program wetland practices on winter occupancy of Passerellidae sparrows and avian species richness. PLoS ONE 14:e0210878.

Reina Tyl, MS, 2019

Reina grew up in a suburb outside of Detroit, Michigan. She spent her childhood exploring the nature preserve near her house and fishing at the pond on her grandparents’ farm in northwest Ohio. In high school, she began going on camping and fishing trips with her friends in the northern part of the lower peninsula. All of these experiences fostered her love of the natural world and inspired her to pursue a career that would allow her to work in the great outdoors.

While completing her undergraduate studies in wildlife and fisheries sciences at The Ohio State University, Reina had the opportunity to intern with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources’ Division of Wildlife. During the internship, she assisted biologists with waterfowl and dove banding, Bobwhite quail surveys, and Conservation Reserve Program land assessments. She also had the opportunity to collaborate with one of the biologists on a paper about population demographics of eastern wild turkeys in Ohio. After graduation, she worked as a research assistant in the Stream and River Ecology Lab at OSU where she monitored the reproductive success, health, and insect diet of nesting tree swallows in central Ohio. Before moving to Morgantown, she spent her summer surveying wetland basins in the prairie pothole region of North Dakota for duck broods.

Reina’s graduate research focuses on the survival and reproduction of eastern wild turkeys in northeastern South Dakota. The vital rate information obtained during this project will be used to assess the demographic performance of the population, and the results will have important implications for the management of wild turkeys in northeastern South Dakota.

Reina is currently a resource scientist at the Missouri Department of Conservation.

Lab Publications:

Tyl, R.M., C.T. Rota, and C.P. Lehman. 2020. Factors influencing productivity of eastern wild turkeys in northeastern South Dakota. Ecology and Evolution 10:8838-8854.

Tatiana Crawford, Undergraduate Assistant, 2017 - 2018

Growing up in Hampshire County, WV one of my favorite things to do as a child was to explore the outdoors. I was a very energetic child, but observing wildlife was one thing that I could sit patiently for hours and do. From the time I was able, hunting, fishing, a hiking became my hobbies. When I learned there were jobs that entailed hunting, fishing, and observing wildlife, I knew that was where I needed to be. My hobbies and goals brought me to West Virginia University where I am majoring in Wildlife and Fisheries Resource Management.

I hope to one day earn a masters in this field and go on to work as a wildlife biologist. I am enjoying my major and am excited to see where the future takes me in terms of jobs and internships. My interests include predatory species of any kind and the genetic processes in the reproduction of wildlife.

Former Undergraduate Students

Tatiana Crawford

Marco Messina

Blayne Ott

Cassidy Rausch

Alyson Scheibe

Caleb Worley

Honorary Lab Members

From left: Rowan (age 6) and Isaac (age 8) canoeing at Indian Lake, NY

The Rota Family

You'll often see the Rota family in the field with us doing fun things. Rowan's favorite bird is the Chickadee-dee-dee, and Isaac is the world expert on Lightning Eagles.