Some projects, especially those without graduate students, are listed only on the Conservation Activities page.

GIS analysts Dan Majka, Jeff Jenness, and I have developed an ArcGIS toolbox (CorridorDesigner) and a toolbar of Corridor Evaluation Tools that allows anyone to design wildlife corridors using the procedures underlying our 16 Arizona designs. It’s free at corridordesign.org, complete with tutorial, pdfs of powerpoint presentations (we are working on Flash versions), and species models for some southwestern species.

I am using genetic data to link habitat use and connectivity to animal abundance.  The Northern Divide Grizzly Bear (NDGB) Project was initiated to estimate the number of grizzly bears in the 8-million-acre Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem (NCDE) in northwestern Montana. We collected 33,000 hair samples in 2004 from hair snares and rub trees.  This yielded  genotypes for 545 individual grizzly bears, creating a  genetic spatial and temporal record of individual animals.  I am using these data to answer several questions: Why are there many bears in some parts of the ecosystem and few bears in others? Can we use the relatedness of individuals to identify places that are less permeable to bear movement? How can we include spatial autocorrelation in models of the number of bears in a local area? What is the best approach for incorporating multiple scales of habitat selection into models of the number of bears using an area?  How can we use multiple data sources (genetic, telemetry, sightings) to estimate the number of bears?  I will use a hierarchical Bayesian framework and simulations to model the way animal movement, habitat use, and sampling methods influence animal abundance in an area. This work is supported by the National Science Foundation (Rigorous estimates of landscape resistance to gene flow; 2009-2011), an NSF IGERT fellowship (2007-2009), NAU School of Forestry, USGS, and partners of the NDGB Project. 

I am developing a new approach to design wildlife linkages more robust to climate change. Most corridor designs are based on current distribution of vegetation communities, which  will soon change due to climate change. My new method will use elevation, slope, aspect, and landform as surrogates for vegetation in linkage design. The rationale is that future vegetation communities will be determined by topography, temperature, precipitation, and soils. By maximizing continuity of elevation, slope, aspect, and landform elements, a linkage design should also maximize continuity of vegetation communities in a changing climate. For several complex landscapes in Arizona, I will compare my topographic linkage designs to existing focal-species designs based on current vegetation. This new approach can be used as an adjunct to current approaches to make linkage designs more robust to climate change. The approach may be most useful in much of the developing world - where digital elevation data are available but maps of vegetation lacking. This work is funded by the McIntire-Stennis program, Arizona Board of Forestry, and the US Forest Service Climate Change Initiative..