Who and What
I am a research scientist with the United States Geological Survey (USGS), Assistant Unit Leader at the Colorado Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology and a faculty member of the Graduate Degree Program in Ecology at Colorado State University.
My focus is on collaborative science:
With my lab and colleagues - we work with scientists and resource and land managers to help learn through data to provide inferential or predictive knowledge or decision-support that is used for empirically informed conservation management of biodiversity.
Our research focus includes
- Wildlife Population Demography and Distribution
- Conservation Decision Making
- Animal Behavior (especially on the diel niche)
- Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling
- Animal Movement and Habitat Selection
- Optimal Prediction via Statistical Regularization
News
October, 2024
New Publication: Muskrat occurrence in Rhode Island shows little evidence of land use change driving declines from John Crockett Muskrat occurrence and wetland change in Rhode Island, USA. Download. Data and code can be found at Zenodo.
New OA Publication: Fisher activity patterns show potential for behavioral adaptations to human modified landscapes from Dr. Laken Ganoe on spatial, temporal, and demographic effects on fisher activity levels. Data and code can be found at Zenodo.
August, 2024
Brian co-instructed an Introduction to R workshop with Georgia Titcomb and Kyle Horton at CSU for graduate students and state and federal agencies.
New Publication: Habitat selection of non-breeding American black ducks in an urban estuary from Tori Mezebish Quinn on the influence of shellfish aquaculture on the spatial ecology of American black ducks. Download.
New OA Publication: Applying a hierarchical Bayesian framework to reveal how fear and animal ownership drive human’s valuation of and interactions with coyotes from Kim Rivera on using hierarchical modeling to understand how people in Rhode Island value coyotes. Data and code can be found at GitHub.
July, 2024
- New OA Publication: Mesocarnivore sensitivity to natural and anthropogenic disturbance leads to declines in occurrence and concern for species persistence from Dr. Laken Ganoe on mesocarnivore response to disturbance in Rhode Island, USA. Data and code can be found at Zenodo.
June, 2024
New OA Publication: A statistical population reconstruction model for wildlife populations: A case study with white-tailed deer and fisher from Dr. Edwige Bellier on a novel hierarchical Bayesian model to recover population variables from age-at-harvest data. Code and data can be found on FigShare.
Brian presents at the 103rd American Society of Mammalogists meeting in Boulder, CO.
Title: A framework to define and estimate animal diel activity.Brian co-instructs a 10-day short course ‘Bayesian Model for Ecologists’ at Colorado State University along with Drs. Tom Hobbs, Mevin Hooten, Becky Tang, and Alison Ketz. This is an NSF funded course (Award 2042028).
April, 2024
- Laken Ganoe passes her dissertation defense! and Nicole Defelice passes her thesis defense!
March, 2024
- New OA Publication: Influence of resource gradients and habitat edges on density variation in tiger populations in a multi-use landscape from Dr. Pranav Chanchani examining drivers of Bengal Tiger populations.
February, 2024
- Brian travels to Norway to be an external PhD examiner at the Norwegian Univeristy of Life Sciences and visits the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research.
January, 2024
- New OA Publication: A model-based hypothesis framework to define and estimate the diel niche via the ‘Diel.Niche’ R package from the Global Animal Diel Activity Project. Download. We propose a conceptual and modeling framework to connect data and hypotheses to make inference about animal diel phenotypes (e.g., diurnal, nocturnal). The Diel.Niche R package can be found on Github and a shiny version can be found here. We also wrote a blog about our paper that is intended for a more general audience.
December, 2023
- New Publication: Forest carnivores living on the edge with invasive predators from the ever persistent Erin Wampole. Download. We found free-roaming dogs and cats interact with their surrounding environment (i.e., forest edge) to shape native carnivore species response differently than within interior forest.
November, 2023
Brian heads to the annual Wildlife Society conference to talk about a recent paper in Animal Conservation about the robustness of optimal decision making in the context of known-unknown meta-population dynamics.
New OA Publication: Diel activity structures the occurrence of a mammal community in a human-dominated landscape led by Amy Mayer from the University of Rhode Island. We found that mammals shift their use of spatial locations and the time of day they are active at these locations to adapt to landscapes with anthropogenic activity. Data and code can be found on Zenodo. The methods used to implement this modeling framework are outlined by Rivera et al. 2022 with code on Github.
September, 2023
- New Publication: Differential impacts of spruce beetle outbreaks on snowshoe hares and red squirrels in the southern Rocky Mountains led by Jake Ivan from the Colorado Parks and Wilddife. Download.
August, 2023
- Brian starts with the Colorado Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit with USGS at Colorado State University. Prior, I was an associate professor at the University of Rhode Island in the Department of Natural Resources Science.