Who
I am a research scientist with the United States Geological Survey (USGS), Assistant Unit Leader at the Colorado Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, 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.
What are cooperative research units?
The mission of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Cooperative Research Units (CRU) is to
- conduct research to inform the management of fish and wildlife
- train graduate students to be effective natural resource scientists, biologists, and managers
- provide technical assistance to natural resource and conservation agencies and groups
The CRU Program was established in 1935 and codified by Congress (Public Law 86-686) in 1960.
The Colorado Unit is staffed, supported, and coordinated by Colorado State University, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the Wildlife Management Institute.
What I do?
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 animal species and their habitats.
My focus is on statistical ecology:
My research often includes developing, evaluating, and applying modern sampling techniques and statistical modeling. I am perhaps a generalist in this regard, as I do not focus on a single class of statistics or statistical models.
Teaching
I teach two graduate courses at Colorado State University, FW670: Wildlife Ecology Modeling and FW552: Applied Sampling for Fish and Wildlife Studies. These courses emphasize the theory and practice of sampling, estimation, and statistical modeling relevant to fish and wildlife ecology and management.
I also teach workshops that have focused mainly on coding in the R programming language, general statistical modeling (hierarhical Bayesian modeling), and more specific topics (mark-recapture, integrated population models).
Some Research Topics
- Wildlife Population Demography and Distribution
- mark-recapture, species distribution modeling, population reconstruction / harvest modeling, integrated population modeling,
- Study design / Model Evaluation
- simulation and model robustness analysis, power analysis
- Conservation Decision Making
- structured decision making, adaptive management
- Animal Behavior
- diel niche, species interactions, predator-prey
- Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling
- integrated data modeling, observational/process modeling
- Animal Movement and Habitat Selection
- home range, movement modeling, habitat selection
- Optimal Prediction via Statistical Regularization
- lasso, ridge, elastic net, machine learning algorithms
News
December, 2025
- New OA Publication: Aggregating three sources of long-term trends of swallows and martins to identify priority conservation areas in the Great Lakes region from Dr. Maria C.T.D. Belotti.
November, 2025
New OA Publication: Covariates influence optimal camera-trap survey design for occupancy modelling from Dr. Owain Barton.
Brian and David Koons hosted Michael Schaub and Marc Kery at Colorado State University, where we co-taught a 5 day workshop on “Integrated Population Models”.
September, 2025
- New OA Publication: Integrated species distribution model using historical data shows decline in a common semi-aquatic mammal from Dr. John Crockett. Data and code can be downloaded on Zenodo.
July, 2025
Dr. Sammie Schofield passes her dissertation defense and finishes her Ph.D. at the University of Rhode Island!
Lê Tấn Quy defends his thesis and finishes his M.S. degree at Vietnam National University – Ho Chi Minh University of Science!
June, 2025
- New Publication: High individual variability in space use by translocated, imperiled New England cottontail (Sylvilagus transitionalis) from Dr. Wales Carter. Download.
May, 2025
- New OA Data Publication: Rhode Island wildlife camera trap survey 2018 to 2023 from Amy Mayer. Download. Data can be found at Zenodo.
April, 2025
New OA Publication: Individuality, diel time, and landscape context shape space-use of an elusive carnivore in a risky environment from Dr. Laken Ganoe. Download. Data and code can be found at Zenodo.
Tori Mezbish Quinn passes her dissertation defense and Liam Corcoran passes his thesis defense at the University of Rhode Island!
February, 2025
- New OA Publication: When the wild things are: Defining mammalian diel activity and plasticity from 217 authors around the world on understanding the variability in animal activity. See all the results from this study online using a ShinyApp. Data and code can be downloaded on Github and Zenodo. Code for the ShinyApp can be downloaded here.
December, 2024
New Publication: Odor swamping did not deter mammalian predators from depredating shorebird nests on beaches from Nicole DeFelice. Download. Data and code can be found at Zenodo.
John Crockett passes his dissertation defense at the University of Rhode Island!
November, 2024
- New OA Publication: A ‘how-to’ guide for estimating animal diel activity using hierarchical models from Dr. Fabiola Iannarilli on improving the modeling of animal diel activity. Data and code can be viewed online here, downloaded here at Github, and archived at DRUM and USGS.
October, 2024
Maria Carolina T. D. Belotti from Colorado State University presents at the American Ornithological Society’s Annual Meeting in Estes Park, CO. Title: Comparison of swallow and martin population trends from three large-scale data sources.
Brian presents at the 31\(^{st}\) annual Wildlife Society Conference in Batlimtore, MD. Title: A framework to define and estimate animal diel activity.
New Publication: Muskrat occurrence in Rhode Island shows little evidence of land use change driving declines from John Crockett on Muskrat 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.