Conservation Ecology Lab

quantitative wildlife ecology and conservation science

• June 2018 – The lab’s first Ohio wildlife research publication PUBLISHED in the open -access journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution! Rich, M., C. Thompson, S. Prange, and V.D. Popescu. Relative importance of habitat characteristics and interspecific interactions in determining terrestrial carnivore occurrence. This is our first field project in Ohio (2016) and was spearheaded by HTC and BIOS student Mackenzie Rich (now a MSc student at Wright State), and current graduate student Cassie Thompson; also a great collaboration first with Dr. Suzie Prange. We thank the Honors Tutorial College for funding Mackenzie to do this work. The study was featured on the OHIO CAS Forum.
• April 2018 – A great month!!! Marissa Dyck accepted a PhD position on our lab working on bobcat ecology and will be joining us in the Fall; WELCOME! Cassie Thompson switched from MSc to a PhD position in the lab, so more frogs and climate change experimental work funded by NSF-Graduate Research Fellowship Program. Ohio DNR funded a 3-year project on Eastern Hellbender ecology and conservation; kudos to PhD student Matt Kaunert for all his work on developing this project, and thanks to collaborators Gregg Lipps, Steve Spear (The Wilds) and John Navarro (ODNR) for the support! New study on brown bear spatial ecology in Nature Conservation from PhD student Mihai Pop and collaborators at University of Bucharest.
• April 2018 – Undergraduate student Ryan Brown (featured here with OhioU President Duane Nellis) won 1st place in the university-wide Student Expo competition. His poster on evaluating biases in citizen science data used for bobcat management in Ohio was absolutely amazing and all his hard work, both in the field and in the lab paid off.
• January 2018 – Seed grant money from the Ohio University Research Committee for Eastern Hellbender ecology! PhD student Matt Kaunert will be working closely with Ohio DNR to monitor captive-bred and released subadults using amplified PIT tag readers, and to understand reproductive ecology by monitoring nest boxes. Exciting project and a new species for our lab!
• January 2018 – New paper in Animal Conservation on spatial conservation prioritization for Brown bears in Romania (with colleagues from University of Bucharest and Association for Biodiversity Conservation). We integrated space use information (home range, habitat selection) and systematic conservation planning (software Zonation) and identified connected, high conservation value habitats, which will inform current efforts to redraft the Romanian national management plan for brown bears!
• September 2017 – We received funding from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources to study bobcat ecology in Ohio! Looking forward to working with Ohio Division of Wildlife biologists over the next 4 years to develop a population model to understand the viability of Ohio’s recovering bobcat population, and inform bobcat management and conservation. Graduate student Heidi Bencin started preliminary work on occupancy and non-invasive genetics this Summer (2017).

 

Prospective graduate students: If you are interested in being part of my lab at Ohio University, please send me: (A) a short statement about yourself and your research interests (background, goals/ambitions, why Ohio University), (B) your resume or CV, and (C) your GPA and GRE scores.