Habitat relationships

Most of my work seeks to understand how species perceive and interact with the resources, conditions, and risks that comprise their habitats. In general, I aim to describe specific responses of animals to these habitat components in a way that furthers our knowledge of both behavior and population dynamics.

Movement ecology

The movements of animals integrate their internal states and behavioral decisions with the structure and function of landscapes. Modeling movement patterns can provide valuable insight into the value of habitat for an animal.

Demography

To understand the influence of habitat conditions on animal population dynamics, information on demographic rates like survival and reproductive success are essential. When estimating these parameters, models should be well-informed by each species' life history, able to handle messy data, and easy to understand and implement in management. 

Physiology & nutrition

What occurs inside an animal is often just as important to understanding habitat requirements and factors influencing population dynamics as its behavior. Metrics of physiological condition can provide insight into the nutritional quality available to a population and can aide in managing food resources on the landscape.

Habitat management

Forested environments are home to tremendous biodiversity, meaning we must balance our human needs and values (e.g., timber production) with the needs of wildlife species. When done right, forest management can create and maintain wildlife habitat alongside providing ecosystem services for human society.

Stand succession

As natural disturbance regimes and successional pathways have been disrupted in forests across the globe, we will be required to emulate these patterns with our own management techniques. Seeking insight into the associations of wildlife and plant species with various successional stages and disturbance types is thus a central goal of my research.

Landscape ecology

While stand-level structure and dynamics are important for local patterns of species occupancy and diversity, they are embedded within the context of their surrounding landscapes. Forest landscapes are a shifting collection of patches and gradients that allow for connectivity and population persistence at wider extents (in space and time). 

Remote sensing

Technologies like satellite and drone-based remote sensing have changed how we map, model, and understand forest ecology. Both spectral and three-dimensional indices derived from sensors allow us to characterize many conditions important to wildlife, including vertical structure, canopy cover, and horizontal complexity within and across forest stands. 

Habitat modeling

Given a wealth of animal tracking and remote sensing data, ecologists are often concerned with building predictive and/or inferential models of habitat relationships (such as habitat selection functions or species distribution models). Much of my past and current work aims to test the assumptions of these statistical techniques while ensuring that we don't lose sight of ecological principles when interpreting their results.

Telemetry & tracking

Data collected by biotelemetry devices (e.g., satellite collars) are by far my favorite to work with; they can provide us with incredibly detailed knowledge of animal behavior, decision-making, and spatial patterns which are often useful for habitat management and conservation. Particularly, I am interested in extracting as much information as possible from tracking data while keeping questions ecologically sound and relevant to application.

Abundance estimation

While information on spatial patterns and demographic rates is critical for management and conservation of wildlife species, we are often limited by our knowledge of population numbers and animal density across sites and landscapes. Several marked and unmarked techniques exist to estimate animal abundance, and my current work addresses the applicability of camera trap-based methods to measure density changes after forest treatments.

Wildlife field capture

Despite the rapid increase in noninvasive methods to study wildlife populations, many important techniques (e.g., marking and affixing tracking devices, collecting measurements and biological samples) mean that animal capture and handling is still a part of the wildlifer's toolkit. Synthesizing past research and conducting new work concerning safe and ethical capture techniques will thus continue to be critical and relevant to wildlife science into the future. 

Small mammals

Small mammals are critical components of just about every terrestrial ecosystem on Earth. I'm particularly interested in how habitat structure influences the behavior, distribution, and community composition of these animals, including lagomorphs and rodents. 

Ungulates

With their wide-ranging movements, ecological and cultural importance, and nutritional requirements that are intimately tied to plant communities, hoofed mammals make excellent study species for understanding the impacts of land use change on wildlife habitat value. 

Cold forests

Cold-temperate and boreal forests are being altered through both climate and land use change across their geographic extents. Shifts in seasonality, snowpack, and disturbance patterns, among other factors, are compounding to disrupt the function of these ecosystems, making them a priority for thoughtful management and conservation. 

Working landscapes

Agriculture and resource extraction are ubiquitous across most of the world's environments. In wildland landscapes in particular, human uses like forestry, grazing, and mining compel us to coexist with the natural world on its (and our) own doorstep.