Who and What
I am a research scientist with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) at the Colorado Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit and a professor at Colorado State University in the Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology.
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
April, 2024
- Laken Ganoe passes her dissertation defense! and Nicole Defelice passes her thesis defense!
March, 2024
- New 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 Gloled by 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 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.