Current Projects

Designing long-term ecological research studies to understand community effects following gray wolf recovery in Colorado

Objective To evaluate monitoring designs to understand indirect effects from predator changes affecting primary consumers (elk/deer) to mountain shrub communities (sagebrush/bitterbrush/serviceberry) in Colorado.

Team: Michael Peyton (Postdoctoral Researcher), Brian Gerber (USGS CRU / CSU), Ellen Brandell (Colorado Parks and Wildlife), and Danielle Bilyeu (Colorado Parks and Wildlife).

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Identifying areas of avian abundance and richness to minimize effects from renewable energy in Colorado

Objectives 1) Use eBird occurrence and richness predictions to evaluate spatial overlap with predicted renewable energy development in Colorado, and 2) create a decision tool to evaluate tradeoffs in optimizing renewable energy development areas that minimizes conflicts with birds.

Team: Jonathan Crossley (M.S. Student), Brian Gerber (USGS CRU / CSU), and Casey Setash (Colorado Parks and Wildlife).

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Using non-individual based data and modeling to estimate New England Cottaintail Abundance

Objectives 1) Evaluate the attributes of the spatial count statistical model to estimate abundance using simulation, and 2) integrate spatial count and telemetry data to estimate the abundance of New England cottontails to inform translocation decisions.

Team: Edwige Bellier (Postdoctoral Researcher), Amy Mayer (Research Associate), Brian Gerber (USGS CRU / CSU), David Kalb (Rhode Island DEM) and Dylan Ferreira (Rhode Island DEM).

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Animal Diel Ecology

Objective: 1) To understand how wild animal’s change their activity and behavior across the 24-hour light-dark cycle to carryout their life history strategy and 2) to develop flexible and conceptually-based modeling approaches to make inference and predictions on animals diel activity use and selection.