Urban Ecology

I am fascinated by Earth's landscapes in today's Anthropocene. While many ecologists and conservationists choose to concentrate on pristine habitat islands and endangered species, I prefer to focus on the "unswimmable ocean" of the human-dominated landscape. I believe that understanding how species thrive (or not) in heterogeneous human-created landscapes is central to conserving biodiversity.

Projects

Three Rivers Parks District

Sam Safran is helping the Three Rivers Parks District evaluate their 30-year effort to restore natural areas on the west side of the Twin Cities.

Stop the Thud

Andrew Hallberg is conducting a comprehenisve, citizen-science based, examination of bird-building collisions of the University of Minnesoat Twin Cities Campus for the Office of Sustainability, The goal is to provide facilities operations information on where bird-buildings collide and how to best reduce these collisins.

Birds, Buildings and the U.S. Bank Stadium

US Bank and the Minnesota Vikings supported a team, including Scott Loss and Abbie Anderson, to evaluate bird collisions with the stadium and how to prevent them.

Project BirdSafe

Project BirdSafe was a. twelve-year citizen-science based effort initiated by Audubon-Minnesota to document bird-building collissions in the downtowns of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. The wealth of information has provided the basis for dissertations and theses by Sami Nichols, Abbie Anderson, and Andrew Hallberg

People

Current Students

Sam Safran

Sam is a PhD student in the Blair lab studying how animals respond to ecosystem change and restoration. His current projects leverage quantitative models, historical sources, and citizen science data to understand/predict the response of vertebrates (mostly birds) to grassland restoration in agricultural landscapes and urban greening in cities. Sam has also worked as an environmental scientist developing tools to support landscape-scale restoration, climate-change adaptation, and ecological resilience in human-dominated ecosystems. [CV]

Andrew Hallberg

Andrew started his MS program in Conservation Sciences fall 2020. He is interested in the intersection between birds and urban areas and researching how to make built environments easier for birds to navigate. Stemming from those interests, Andrew has started a community science initiative called Stop the Thud that aims to quantify and mitigate bird-building collisions at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities campus. To learn more about Stop the Thud or to record a bird strike, please visit the project web site. Andrew enjoys birding, hiking, disc golf, baseball and keeping up with the latest TV shows and movies.

Zonish Javed

Zonish is an international Fulbright Scholar from Pakistan. She is a beginning PhD student in the Conservation Sciences Graduate Program, aspiring to be an Ornithologist. Her research interests are exploring speciation/species delimitation as a consequence of Geographic fragmentation.

Lucas Rapisarda

Lucas Rapisarda is a first year PhD student in Conservation Sciences interested in the intersection between science education, environmental health, and racial (in)justice. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, his research hopes to better understand how community-based science can bridge social, racial, and gender gaps to empower communities to advocate for environmental justice. Currently, Lucas is a fellow in the Institute on the Environment in Ecosystem Health at the University of Minnesota, and is the program coordinator for Nature for New Minnesotans, a partnership between the UofM Master Naturalist Program and ELL communities in the Twin Cities metro area."


Successfully Fledged Students

Abbie Anderson

MS student who worked with Project BirdSafe to determine what landscape factors affect bird-building collisions -- She now coordinates two citizen science projects: Cover It Up and Pesky Plant Trackers Modeling. Thesis: Bird-Window Collisions in Core Urban Environments.

Sami Nichols

PhD student who now teaches biology at University of Wisconsin -- River Falls. Sami worked with Project BirdSafe to determine what building characteristics were the most influential in bird-building charactreristics. Dissertation: Birds & Buildings: Bird-Window Collisions in the Urban Landscape

Scott Loss

PhD student who is now a professor at Oklahoma State University. His dissertation addressed invasive earthworms in the north woods. Dissertation: Relations among invasions of non-native earthworms, forest floor habitat, and populations of ground-nesting songbirds in north temperate hardwood forests.

Jiraporn Tampanpong

PhD student who is now a professor at Kasetsart University in Bangkok. Dissertation: Maintaining Hornbills in the Working Landscape of the Southern Tenasserim Western Forest Complex Corridor in Thailand

David Pavlik

MS student who is now a Research Assistant at Michigan State University. Thesis: Post-Fire Associations Of Butterfly Behavior, Occupancy, And Abundance With Environmental Variables And Nectar Sources In The Sierra Nevada, California

Tania Homayoun

PhD student who is now the coordinator for Texas Nature Trackers for Texas Parks and Wildlife. This program uses citizen science to inventory wildlife acorss Texas. Dissertation: Citizen-science monitoring of birds in urban greenspaces.

Liz Johnson

MS student who is now the Urban Conservation Policy & Strategy Lead at The Nature Conservancy.

Derric Pennington

PhD student who is a Senior Sustainability Scientist in the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota. Dissertation: Riparian bird communities along an urban gradient: effects of local vegetation, landscape biophysical heterogeneity, and spatial scale

Publications

It's best to visit my Google Scholars Page for a current list of papers.