Research

NaturaConnect is an ambitious EU-funded project that aims to design a resilient Trans-European Nature Network. With a interdisciplinary set of collaborators across 15 EU countries at over 20 institutions and NGOs, the project will produce scientific, technical, and capacity building materials that will lead the EU in creating a ecologically connected network of protected areas. I am modelling multi-scale pan-European ecological connectivity for the project which will directly inform EU conservation planning.

The UNESCO Congaree Biosphere Region is situated in the midlands of South Carolina and is one of 28 Biosphere Reserves in the United States. My research here included the multi-species occupancy of the breeding bird community, focal species connectivity modelling, and coordinating an integrated systematic conservation planning exercise.

Conflict with humans is one of the major threats to the conservation of wild tigers. I am working with researchers at the Global Tiger Forum, RESOLVE, Wildlife Institute of India, and Tigers United University Consortium to test new AI camera trap technology and spatially predict human-tiger conflict.

Conservation planning must be multi-disciplinary integrating multiple forms of data into one cohesive plan that most efficiently conserves multi—taxa biodiversity, ecosystem services, and ecological connectivity. We used program Marxan to bring together stakeholder interests to create a efficient conservation plan and used a ArcGIS Experience to present results and gather public comments.

Forty years of research has shown that human recreation, both consumptive and non-consumptive, has a significant impact on wild animal populations. While working for the Wildlife Conservation Society and in collaboration with Sonoma Land Trust I coordinated a project to study the effects of recreation on wildlife of the Sonoma Valley, California and conducted a systematic review of the primary literature for recreation effect thresholds.

Dall's sheep are a charismatic mountain sheep species that are sought out by wildlife watchers and hunters, alike. We operated camera traps for 24 consecutive months using a combination of triggered and timelapse images to analyze the occupancy of Dall's sheep on Fort Wainwright, Alaska. Our results provided spatially-explicit and temporal recommendations for military training and the use of novel alpine camera trap methods.

By understanding how biodiversity varies in space we can better plan for biodiversity conservation. We estimated the proportional wetland cover of the contiguous United States and then modeled the spatially-varying magnitude of relationship between wetland cover and taxa-specific species richness. The relationship for all taxa varied in space and followed closely to level III ecoregional boundaries.

Despite being relatively common, the jungle cat has been researched the least out of the four wild cat species in Sri Lanka. I collaborated with conservation biologists in Sri Lanka that collected citizen science data across the island nation to produce the first probabilistic habitat suitability maps for the species. The study expanded the official known range of the species on the island nation and provided important information about the niche this species holds in Sri Lanka.

The impacts of human recreation on wildlife species can be highly variable both by species and by recreation type. We developed and conducted a pilot study to investigate the impacts of different recreation types on two species of concern on the Colorado Front Range.

When we survey for wildlife we rarely detect all the individuals of a species. This is especially problematic when we are surveying for endangered species and are not accounting for imperfect detection. To inform survey protocols, I conducted a survival analysis of detection-nondetection data on the endangered California Gnatcatcher to explore detection heterogeneity within the species .