OHIO Conservation Ecology Lab

quantitative wildlife ecology and conservation science

• November 2018 – Heidi Bencin is the second lab fledgling! CONGRATS Heidi for a fabulous MSc thesis and defense on bobcats, roads, camera trapping, genetics… and so on…! Thank you for the incredible amount of work and dedication… and your amazing drawings! 
• September 2018 – Our lab, supported by several other faculty in the Departments of Biological Sciences, Environmental and Plant Biology and the Voinovich School Environmental Studies Program, was awarded $50,000 from the Ohio University 1804 Fund to develop an outdoor aquatic mesocosm research facility on the OHIO Athens campus. This facility research will provide research and experiential learning opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, and facilitate collaborations with a broad network of similar facilities in the US Midwest and Northeast. Find more details about the facility and ongoing aquatic mesocosm research involving larval amphibians at OHIO here.
• August 2018 – PhD student Matt Kaunert, joined by with OU undergraduate researchers Andrew Travers, Ryan Wagner, Christine Hanson, and Megan Sweeney, Hocking College student Hannah Kopp, research assistant Julia Golias, and French graduate Student Eva Garcia, are helping out with Eastern Hellbender releases in Ohio (in collaboration with Ohio DNR; see photos below) and deployment of nest boxes, a habitat augmentation strategy, in Pennsylvania.
  

  

  
• July 2018 – Marcel Weigand, Cassie Thompson and Heidi Bencin presented their MSc research at the North American Congress for Conservation Biology, Toronto. Cassie and Marcel were selected as Student Award Finalists, out of hundreds of abstract submissions! Congrats…. #OhioBobcats represent!
• JULY 2018 – First thesis defense in my lab! Marcel Weigand did an incredible job showcasing her novel ecological and physiological research on impacts of roadways on Eastern Box Turtles. CONGRATULATIONS!
• June 2018 – The lab’s first Ohio wildlife research paper 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!

 

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.