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In my view, the most important indicator of success is that my work is both useful and used toward management and conservation. For more information about each project, follow the links below, or navigate with the sidebar (click the menu button at the top left if you don't see a sidebar).
My current work involves designing a continental sampling scheme for monarch butterflies and the resources that sustain them, including milkweed. Monarchs have declined by 84% in the eastern U.S. and 96% in the west over the past 20-30 years, and we need a better understanding of the processes driving the decline. My role is to identify a spatially balanced and statistically robust set of sites that will be sampled in the coming years to monitor trends in milkweed, monarchs, and nectar resources. As part of this work, we are also developing guidance for conducting power analyses for long-term monitoring programs.
We also recently received funding to work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to develop a population viability analysis for Golden-winged Warblers. The analysis will help inform USFWS's upcoming decision on whether to list Golden-wings under the endangered species act. We are developing a species-complex approach to the model, as one of the threats facing Golden-wings is extensive hybridization with Blue-winged Warblers.
With the Arctic Shorebird Demographics Network, I collaborated with other scientists and managers to assess the status of sensitive species and direct future research to best inform strategies for conservation. We quantified a number of demographic rates, including true adult survival, seasonality in reproductive parameters, and effects of covariates on breeding success across the Russian and North American Arctic for 21 species. We are now using those rates to develop population models for six focal species. We also evaluated effects of geolocators and leg flags on the individual birds that carried those tags.
My PhD research was jump-started by a question from managers about how many kiwi should be used to start a new population. This question led me to develop AlleleRetain, a model which is available as an R package on CRAN and has been used to inform management of a variety of species, including birds, geckos, and Tasmanian devils. During my PhD, I also worked closely with the kiwi and the kokako recovery groups, which are led by New Zealand's Department of Conservation, to develop recommendations for the populations that they are managing. The NZ Department of Conservation has since used AlleleRetain to expand this work and provide guidance for a number of commonly translocated native species, including the South Island robin (pictured at left).
I also worked with managers of the Chatham Island black robin to assess effects of inbreeding in this severely bottlenecked species, and to determine the consequences of these effects for long-term viability. These effects are much more complex than we originally assumed, so the implications are not straightforward. See Threatened NZ Birds for more information on my PhD work.
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