Snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus) are a critical link the food webs of northern forest ecosystems. In patchy, fragmented montane forests in the contiguous United States, they reach their highest abundances in dense, highly-stocked conifer stands, but these forests can pose wildfire and forest health risks when left unmanaged. Thus there is a need for managers to develop actionable stand density treatments (like pre-commercial thinning, or PCT) that balances the benefits of stem reduction with the dense habitat requirements of hares. In collaboration with the Washington Department of Natural Resources (WDNR), we're studying the effects of two "hare-friendly" PCT treatments (retention of unthinned patches and slash pile construction) on the population and behavioral ecology of hares in highly-stocked montane forest stands in the Loomis State Forest (north-central Washington). Our main objectives are to assess (1) how hares respond behaviorally to stem density reduction, and whether they use patches/piles embedded within thinned stands, and (2) whether cover reduction lead to higher mortality and changes in population density compared to unthinned control sites. 

Wapiti/elk (Cervus canadensis) were reintroduced to Kentucky beginning in the late 1990s, with over 1,500 individuals translocated from six western states. Since then, changes in both the elk population and landscapes across the Kentucky Elk Restoration Zone have prompted our research group to launch a multi-year study of elk reproductive and spatial ecology to gain a better understanding of how these animals are interacting with their environment throughout the southeastern part of the state. So far, we've used satellite telemetry to investigate how coarse-scale movements can indicate reproductive success, how variables measured at multiple spatial grains predict calving habitat, and how functional responses and behavioral clustering drive individual variation in habitat selection in this population. Along with collaborators from the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, our work is helping to paint a more complete picture of eastern wapiti ecology. 

Animals often rely upon cues from their early-life environment to maximize their success after dispersing to a new location. While this phenomenon (termed natal habitat preference induction, or NHPI) is well-documented across mammal taxa, it has yet to be identified during movement paths themselves, even though extra-home range movements can provide dispersing individuals with valuable information on habitat quality. We tested this idea in deer in central Illinois, using GPS tracking data to relate their habitat selection along movement paths with dissimilarity from their natal home ranges. We found that deer strongly avoided natal habitat dissimilarity during dispersal paths, suggesting that familiarity may underpin some of their decisions as they move across novel environments, and has important implications for landscape connectivity and how movement behavior may differ by individual within populations. We published this work in Ecology and Evolution in 2023.