Research Projects

The planet is facing unprecedented environmental change, and how species and populations respond will be critical to their survival. While extensive research has demonstrated how wildlife respond to environmental change through selective pressure, the ability of animals to learn and modify their behaviors remains an understudied yet incredibly important avenue of research. Understanding how animals acquire and use spatial information is fundamental to behavioral ecology, but studying cognitive processes in natural settings remains challenging, as most work on spatial behavior of wild animals derives from empirical data on individuals already settled on the landscape—animals that presumably have extensive knowledge of their surrounding environment. Understanding how adult animals learn information in novel or changing circumstances is imperative to identifying factors that may inhibit or support the survival and reproduction of wild animals in the face of novel or rapidly changing environments.

Changes in land use and climate are drastically altering Earth’s ecosystems, necessitating wildlife to adapt swiftly. By understanding the mechanisms underlying shifts in behavior, we can identify the limitations of behavioral flexibility and better predict how populations will cope, or not, with environmental change as well as understand what to target to help buffer populations (e.g., protecting critical habitat or certain behaviors such as migration).

While working at Fort Lewis College (FLC), I along with partners at the US Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, US National Park Service, Southwest Conservation Corps, and Mountain Studies Institute, created a new internship program to get local students paid experience with federal agencies. This was the first program of its kind at FLC and was wildly successful; it continues to run today. Colleagues at SW Conservation Corps, Mountain Studies Institute, and I were given the Cultural Transformation Award by the USFS for our efforts in designing and implementing the program. You can read more about it here and here.

Conservation initiatives often fail to consider how animals learn and remember information about their environment, limiting their effectiveness. My research demonstrates how understanding learning mechanisms can improve conservation outcomes across contexts. Working with Parks Canada, I showed how varying management interventions influence learning and space use in reintroduced bison, providing practical guidelines for improving reintroduction success.

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Spatial learning is hypothesized to facilitate behavioral adaptation to environmental change, yet surprisingly little is known about spatial learning in realistic settings that capture the complex and dynamic shifts in resources animals face in our rapidly changing world. Furthermore, understanding how variation in spatial learning affects fitness is an important missing link limiting our understanding of how cognition scales up to affect broader ecological processes. This research aims to uncover fundamental rules governing how individual-level cognitive traits and environmental change interact to produce emergent population-level patterns of distribution and persistence across altered landscapes, and will allow managers to better understand how and when human-animal conflict is likely to occur.

Despite growing attention, diversity in STEM  fields has been declining over the past 20 years and this is especially true for women. The leaky pipeline for women in the sciences starts as early as primary school, however, during undergrad, this problem persists with lower retention rates in STEM fields and fewer women continuing to careers in STEM. Undergraduate Field Experiences (UFEs) are one method to improve, if not fix, the leaky pipeline and are known to improve student attitudes, skillsets, retention in undergraduate programs, as well as increase the likelihood of students continuing to graduate degree programs. We offered a weeklong program, called Women in the Field, for undergraduate students in Wyoming. The program, led by female-identifying faculty, graduate students, and scientists, taught students basic field skills and safety in a combined classroom and field setting. Students learned from a diverse group of scientists thereby improved confidence, built community, and applied newly gained skills. Students then followed-up throughout the school year with the co-PI’s to work on resume building and applying for summer field positions. Our aim was to help female-identifying students not only prepare for careers in STEM, but also gain the awareness of opportunities, confidence to apply, and skillsets to succeed. Read more here.