Something like a philosophy
The world is incredibly complex and dynamic. This is true, too, for the particular biotic and abiotic environments that all animals exist in. Food resources alone can be patchy or cryptic, can appear and disappear, sometimes even run around themselves. Yet, animals manage (mainly) to navigate, survive, reproduce, and persist. At the broadest level, my research addresses the question: How!?
To that end, and with countless collaborators & students, I apply a wide range of overlapping approaches. We develop statistical tools for the analysis of animal movements, survival, and behavior. We develop and explore theoretical models to frame questions and explore scenarios. And - perhaps most importantly - we try to collect and analyze field data in insightful and creative ways to answer specific questions.
I have been lucky enough to contribute to and work on a terrific diversity of fascinating projects: Steller sea lions and northern fur seals in the north Pacific, panda in southwest China, sea lamprey in the Great Lakes, Asiatic cheetah, manatee in Florida, Antarctic ice seals, armadillos in Brazil, invasive willows in Australia, continental-scaled analysis of plant phenology across northern Eurasia, and more and more and more.
Projects:
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Fate of the Caribou: Migratory caribou movements, behaviors and populations, with emphasis on the effects of climate change and human development across northern Canada and Alaska. This work centers local and Indigenous knowledge and concerns, combining movement, survival and monitoring data with next generation remote sensing - of snow and ice, of vegetation, of temperatures and winds - to draw links to the dramatic demographics of an iconic species in the Arctic. Our goal is to inform community-lead stewardship of caribou and to quantify climate-induced changes in caribou distributions to guide land use decision making.
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Cognitive movement ecology Exploring through theory, conceptual development, and innovative empirical analysis the role that spatial memory, learning, and sociality shape the way animals use space. See this special journal issue devoted to the topic.
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Coexistence ecology: Drivers, mechanisms and structure of coexistence and competition (direct and apparent), with a special focus on meso-carnivores (coyote, bobcat, fisher, fox, raccoon, marten) in New York State and neighboring states using non-invasive tools: camera traps, scat sampling, snow tracking and acoustic monitoring.
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Predator-prey-disease-ecology: Exploring the potential role of selective predation, esp. of wolves, in potentially slowing the spread of Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in Wisconsin, in partnership with the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission.
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Methodological developments for wildlife ecology:: Developing innovative, creative, sophisticated, yet easy-to-use statistical tools to help wildlife practitioners maximize the quality and nuance of inference from all kinds of ecological data, especially movement data, survival data, camera trap observations. See a list of R packages we’ve developed here, with “fun” names like smoove, marcher, cyclomort, TuktuTools).