December 2024
Another new paper just came out in Ecography exploring the impact that statistical and survey-method choices implicate different mechanisms underlying species responses to climate change. By testing binary and ordinal occupancy modeling approaches, we found that this seemingly minor difference in methods has major implications, indicating that either heat stress in summer best explains occupancy (binary) or chronic cold stress in winter is the culprit (ordinal). Overall, including historical evidences appears to provide added mechanistic insights beyond those of presence/absence analyses and can be incorporated in species distribution models for future predictions.
November 2024
Our new paper just came out in ESA’s Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment exploring a new approach for predicting range shifts along environmental gradients globally! As it turns out, simple metrics of abundance and occupancy provide strong clues into the direction and rate of species warm-limit shifts, whereby abundance distributions tend to lean in the same direction the species’ will soon shift. This framework can be rapidly be deployed at various scales and inexpensively.
October 2024
A recent news article discusses American pikas in Idaho, featuring some of my past work as well as insights from Dr. Erik Beever of the USGS Northern Rockies Science Center. The article primarily focuses on the effects of climate change on pikas across the state and what can be expected in the near future.
May 2024
I was recently awarded the federal Joint Fire Science Program’s Graduate Research Innovation (GRIN) grant for $25,000 for my dissertation work titled “Evaluating How Wildfire Severity Shapes Genetic Diversity for Species Inhabiting Fire Refugia.” In this work, I’m investigating how recent high-severity wildfires in the Northern Rockies are shaping the population genetics of Columbia spotted frogs and long-toed salamanders, two pond-breeding amphibians that may be sensitive to changing fire regimes across the American West. Funding will be used for sequencing the genetic diversity in montane populations across Idaho and Montana in order to help us understand exactly how this diversity is impacted by intensifying disturbance events.
October 2023
A recent article in Nature discusses our upcoming paper on how varying statistical choices can lead to drastically divergent conclusions when investigating the same ecological question among many groups of scientists.
August 2023
A recent news article just published discusses the state of American pikas in Colorado, featuring work from the fantastic Colorado Pika Project and Denver Zoo, Dr. Johanna Varner at Colorado Mesa University, as well as a little of my own research in the Southern Rockies!
July 2023
Our new paper just came out examining non-stationarity in pika-climate relationships across the Southern, Central, and Northern Rocky Mountains! While our findings continue to illustrate the species’ sensitivity to higher temperatures across its geographic range, results also highlight how precipitation both in summer and winter have discordant effects on occupancy and population density in this species depending on the ecoregion.
June 2023
Out now, our new paper in Biological Conservation uses species traits to evaluate how various montane mammals in North America vary in their adaptive capacity (AC) to intensifying climate change. In particular, we focus on American pikas, yellow-bellied marmots, deer mice, golden-mantled ground squirrels, and bushy-tailed woodrats. Beyond the inter-species assessment comparisons, we also assess how AC might vary across species’ geographic ranges within a given species. These findings exemplify how species within given communities or habitats can vary drastically in their ability to cope with climate change.
October 2021
In a new interview with NPR Boise State Public Radio’s Idaho Matters, we discuss with Tom Michael how warming temperatures are pushing American pikas upslope across the eastern portion of the state.
September 2021
Our new paper for my master’s research is officially published in Global Change Biology! This investigation examined how climate change influences- 1) local population densities, 2) occupancy (i.e., where species live now vs in the past), as well as 3) the underlying mechanisms causing widespread upslope retractions across the Northern Rocky Mountains of North America. A pika photo (below) also graced the cover of this month’s issue.
June 2021
New interview on how American pikas serve as an early indicator of how species will respond to climate change moving forward, featured in Colorado 350:
April 2021
I am excited to announce that I will begin my Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in Storrs, CT. Within the EEB Department, I will be working with Dr. Mark Urban to further our understanding of the evolutionary mechanisms that influence species range shifts in response to climate change. Further, I was fortunate enough to be awarded the Jorgensen Fellowship from UConn, which includes $100k over five years. I will also participate in the Team-TERRA NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) from 2021-2023; the primary goals of this project are to understand, predict, and communicate risks to ecosystem services across the northeastern US megalopolis from D.C. to Boston under contemporary climate change and further urbanization.
