Diandra Lewis - MSc student
Having previously studied monkeys and their interactions with humans and with each other in India, I have now moved on to interactions between animals and fruits in Gabon. I am studying the effect that frugivores may have on the evolution of fruit traits. I want to see if fruits in the wild have evolved their specific shapes, colours, sizes and nutrient compositions in order to attract animals that feed on them and disperse their seeds. I spend my summers studying the different species of fruits, watching animals like monkeys, apes, duikers, and hornbills feeding on them, and running from elephants.
Jennifer Wall - PhD student
Our global climate is changing rapidly, and we see examples of this through increasing temperatures, changing snow and rainfall patterns, and thawing permafrost. These changes are altering the structure and function of communities. My research focuses on assessing the impacts of both climate and vegetation changes on alpine wildlife, which may be particularly at risk due to both landcover changes and temperature increases in alpine tundra across much of the Arctic. I am conducting research on Arctic ground squirrels, collared pikas, and hoary marmots in Denali National Park, Alaska. I plan to assess the spatial environmental factors related to the distribution and co-occurrence of these focal species and to project how changes to these factors will impact alpine wildlife distributions. As part of my research, I am leading the Denali Alpine Wildlife Project, a citizen science project where park visitors can upload photographs of alpine wildlife sightings to iNaturalist. I will be using this data to assess the efficacy of using a global citizen science program to assess large-scale wildlife distributions.
Daniel Bird - PhD student (co-advised with Josh Millspaugh)
My research work is focused on identifying elk (Cervus elaphis) migration corridors, stop-over sites, barriers to movement, and habitat selection on and around the Blackfeet Nation Indian Reservation located in northwestern Montana, USA. The Blackfeet Nation is situated on the east of Glacier National Park and borders Alberta, Canada to the north. This unique location is vegetatively dominated by grasslands. Partnering with the tribe allows us to focus on tribal needs as well as learn more about landscape ecology of elk and the effects that fences have on their seasonal movements. I am from the small indigenous community of Kewa Pueblo, located in Central New Mexico. I enjoy the outdoors with family and friends, running, playing baseball, and creating visual art.
Adi Shabrani Bin Mohammad Ridzuan - PhD student
Being born and raised on the island of Borneo (Sarawak, Malaysia), I have forever been fascinated by the unique wilderness of my homeland. I am interested in untangling the complex relationship between fauna and their habitat in the tropics, in order to explain how tropical rainforests can support high biodiversity. Previously, I studied Bornean frogs' functional diversity, their reproductive traits and strategies, and how habitat disturbance affected these. For my current work, I study forest phenology in Sabah and how the vertebrate community responds to spatiotemporal fruiting patterns. I aim to ascertain how fruit & seed production in the tropics can affect faunal community structure, both in terrestrial and arboreal strata, as well as figuring out what factors importantly influence abundance and diversity. I use drones to collect above-canopy data and machine learning to link these observations to on-the-ground data from seed traps and camera traps. I am also interested in wildlife response and resilience to habitat change, in particular landscape modification. Apart from being a grad student, I am staff scientist with WWF-Malaysia.
PAST STUDENTS
Peter Williams - PhD (now a postdoc at Michigan State University)
I am interested in community ecology, in particular plant-animal interactions. Animals affect plant populations through seed dispersal and seed predation, while fruits and seeds are important resources for animal populations. I do my research in the tropical forests of Malaysian Borneo, where overhunting threatens to disrupt these plant-animal interactions. Specifically, I am studying: 1) whether other seed predators compensate when large vertebrates are removed, 2) whether we can predict how overhunting will affect tropical tree populations based on our knowledge of plant-animal interactions, and 3) whether frugivorous mammals compete for resources during resource pulses. I’m also interested in broader ecological patterns of how ecological communities are influenced by their environments. My research consists of many different approaches—observational fieldwork, field experiments, computer modeling, and analysis of large datasets—to better untangle the complicated ecological patterns that underlie the sublime biodiversity we see in nature.
Teoh Shu Woan
My PhD research is part of a consortium working in Sabah, Malaysia towards assessing biodiversity within a highly heterogeneous, mixed-used landscape. I am looking at the potential of the study site to support landscape connectivity. This is done by assessing the response of mammals to a variety of land use changes, and examining how hunting pressure varies in different land use types and affects mammal occupancy and site usage. The results from this study will be incorporated into a land use management plan for Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. My overall goal is to do research that is driven by conservation to address specific issues, and work with people on the ground to overcome those issues.
Mairin Deith - PhD
Across the globe, many people rely on wild animals for sustenance. This is especially true in tropical rainforests, where bushmeat hunting provides a significant portion of rural peoples' diets. Due to population growth, increased forest access from logging, and the widespread use of firearms, hunted species that are relied upon for food and ecosystem services are disappearing from the forest. My graduate work focuses on developing reliable predictors of hunting pressure and using these predictors to test the efficacy of various sustainable hunting strategies. Specifically, I am exploring whether traditional resource management schemes can preserve muntjac deer, mouse deer, bearded pig, and pig-tailed macaque populations in Malaysian Borneo.
Scott Waller - MSc (co-advised with Mark Hebblewhite)
I am testing new methods to estimate prey abundance for Siberian tiger conservation in the Russian Far East, using camera traps as an alternative to traditional Russian snow track surveys. This work is supported by the Wildlife Conservation Society Russia Program and the Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Reserve who together have been leaders in Siberian tiger research and conservation for decades. I grew up on a hay farm outside of Kalispell, Montana, and studied in Vermont at Middlebury College, where I earned an undergraduate degree in conservation biology and minored in Russian language. Between semesters, I worked for five summers as a grizzly bear technician for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. Beyond wildlife studies, I am an active music composer, translator, horseback rider, and powderhound.
Adrienne Contasti - PhD
I am a quantitative population ecologist who is passionate about conservation. Thus, my interests lie equally in: (1) understanding the factors that influence spatial and temporal habitat use by animals and (2) preserving the functional role that animals play in promoting or maintaining overall community dynamics (e.g., through plant-animal interactions). These interests are not mutually exclusive, and so I am concerned by the sometimes disconnect between ecological research and conservation practice. For my PhD, I am identifying the ways that human impacts such as hunting and habitat fragmentation alter habitat use and the functional role of mammals in tropical forests. My work assesses how human disruptions threaten not only animal population viability but also overall ecosystem function. My ultimate goal is to guide community based conservation efforts in developing countries by making the results of purely ecological studies accessible and understandable to the public.
Alys Granados - PhD
Seed dispersal by vertebrates is important for forest growth and regeneration, but human disturbance threatens this mutualistic interaction, with population-level consequences for plants and animals that are not well understood. I am studying how habitat alteration affects the occurrence, diversity, movement, and persistence of a suite of large mammal species in Borneo, and asking when this disruption matters for tree seed dispersal. Specifically, I am assessing 1) whether selective logging reduces the ability of forest vertebrates to spatially and temporally track fruit availability, 2) how the loss of herbivores affects tree seed and seedling demography, and 3) how logging affects seed dispersal via changes in animal behavior. My field work is in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, and uses camera traps, exclosure experiments, and behavioural observations.
Cheng Chen - MSc
Protected areas are supposed to protect biodiversity, but they do not always work when humans can still access and exploit natural resources within them. Local people that conduct poaching and illegal resource extractions can have big impact on animal population. My project is to understand how law enforcement in parks and local peoples' attitudes towards conservation affect mammal conservation. I am camera trapping in several parks that have different management levels in Xishuangbanna (a tropical region in southern China near the borders with Laos and Myanmar). I will investigate the impacts of human on mammals by relating the biodiversity metrics from camera traps to levels of conservation enforcement of parks and conservation attitudes of local people (measured by interview surveys). The results will help us to manage protected area more efficiently.
Matthew Strimas-Mackey - MSc
Humans are currently altering the Earth's surface at an unprecedented scale and rate. These changes are particularly acute in the tropics, where rampant deforestation and forest degradation is driving biodiversity losses and contributing to global climate change. I am developing spatially explicit models of land-use and land-cover change to investigate the spatial distribution of tropical deforestation relative to underlying environmental and socio-economic factors. I use these models to refine extinction estimates developed under the island biogeography paradigm to account for spatial heterogeneity in habitat loss. In essence, my project is building on the concept of Systematic Conservation Planning (e.g., using Marxan software), by incorporating landscape connectivity and metapopulation persistence into the planning process.
Tanner Humphries - MSc
Species reintroductions have become a common management strategy to re-establish species to their historical range while helping to restore ecosystem integrity. Fishers (Pekania pennanti) historically occurred in Washington State before they were extirpated in the early 1900’s due to human pressures. Following the listing of the fisher as an endangered species in the State of Washington in 1998, a collaborative effort between state, federal, and non-profit organizations was formed to reintroduce and restore fishers to the Cascade Range in Washington. At the reintroduction sites, differences in prey abundance and competitor or predator densities could affect home range establishment and whether fisher recovery is successful. My research investigates the effects of interspecific competition and prey availability on habitat selection by reintroduced fishers in the North Cascades. Understanding these components of the ecosystem will also provide significant resource management insights and baseline data that will be immensely valuable for monitoring of carnivore populations into the future.
Sam Yue - MSc
The expansion of oil palm into tropical forests is probably the single biggest current threat to overall global biodiversity. The oil palm industry is rapidly expanding and replacing rainforests in Southeast Asia. Yet, there is currently a dearth of knowledge on wildlife movement through and around oil palm plantations. My project investigated the habitat selection of mammals in these plantations compared to rainforests in Malaysian Borneo. Specifically, I used camera trapping in Danum Valley, a lowland dipterocarp forest, and nearby plantations to see how tree age, canopy cover, and road proximity affect mammal abundance and diversity. Results were used to map wildlife corridors connecting existing forest reserves through plantations and other altered landscapes.
Meagan Grabowski - MSc
Warming temperatures in the circumpolar have led to a 'greening' of the tundra, mostly led by tall shrub expansion. Implications of shrub proliferation include changes in plant community composition, changes in carbon storage, and increased nutrient cycling. But what is happening below treeline? Are warmer temperatures also contributing to shrubification in the boreal forest? For my masters I studied the determinants of shrub growth in the Kluane region of my home territory, the Yukon. I used dendroecological approaches to look for signals of herbivory (snowshoe hare cycles), fertilization experiments, and climate on shrub and tree growth. My broader research interests include northern socioecological resilience and local knowledge.
Patrick Burke - MSc
Habitat connectivity facilitates the movement of organisms through time and across landscapes, and maintaining connectivity (e.g. through wildlife corridors) is a popular and effective tool for prioritizing land protection. But how are connectivity and corridors affected when the entire landscape alters, for example through climate change? My graduate work investigates this question using multi-taxa connectivity assessment in the context of changing climatic conditions in the Greater North Cascades Ecosystem (Washington State and British Columbia). I use empirical field data in predictive dispersal models to examine the capacity of dynamic, heterogeneous landscapes to support connectivity for multiple carnivore and ungulate species in the face of changing winter snowpack and altered fire regimes. Both fire and snowpack impact local habitat suitability and dispersal, thereby influencing populations at multiple spatial scales. Empirical climate-connectivity research is critical so that we can continue to use habitat corridors to maintain biodiversity under changing conditions.