News
In Nature Reviews Biodiversity, postdoc Mike Belitz advocates for the protection of whole communities, arguing this would be the most effective way to quantify, predict, and manage biodiversity.
The lab put together a collection of 36 influential “statistical innovation” papers published in Ecology over the last century and wrote a review highlighting the history of this impactful body of work.
Elise has been named a Red Cedar Distiguished Professor, a distinction awarded to Spartans with exemplary scholarly accomplishments who demonstrate teaching excellence.
In Nature Communications, postdoc Peter Williams shows how long-lasting separation between continents has shaped distinct mammal, but not bird, communities around the globe.
Graduate student Sam Ayebare led an analysis, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, to uncover mechanisms that allow so many bird species to coexist in the vast Albertine Rift ecoregion.
Graduate student Kayla Davis led an analysis, published in Biological Conservation, to evaluate conservation approaches to mitigate and reverse black tern declines.
Curious to learn more about our work? The College of Natural Science at MSU produced a video highlighting some of the lab’s research and its impact on the world. See a circa 2016 lab video here.
With a $1.3M grant, our lab will team up with National Audubon on a continential-scale data integration project to estimate and forecast the effects of climate and land-use change on bird communities.
Postdoc Courtney Davis led a review on the challenges and opportunities for using natural history data to estimate insect trends in a special issue published in the Journal of Animal Ecology.
A new model developed by graduate student Matt Farr is extracting more information than ever from camera traps and other low-cost data sources to help inform conservation efforts.
Two papers in Methods Ecology and Evolution, led by postdoc Jeff Doser, outline a new R package – spOccupancy – and a technique that combines occupancy and community models with data integration.
Graduate student Alex Wright led an analysis evaluating the effectiveness of common wildlife monitoring strategies to assess changes in species occurences, published in Ecological Applications.
Graduate student Kayla Davis led a team from MSU, USGS, and USFWS in an intensive examination of the pitfalls and solutions in using aerial survey data to estimate wildlife abundances.
Visiting student Xabier Cabodevilla led an international team in evaluating the impacts of irrigation on a community of birds in northern Spain using unique Before-After-Control-Impact (BACI) data.
Graduate student Sam Ayebare received a Russell E. Train Fellowship from the World Wildlife Fund to support his PhD research and facilitate his next steps with a career in Uganda, his home country.
Elise was awarded a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to build statisical modeling capacity in Israel and assess the effects of climate change on insects using data from The Steinhardt Museum of Natural History.
Sarah Saunders and Elise Zipkin created a model to understand and project threats to endangered species, earning the Ecological Society of America’s Outstanding Forecasting Publication Award.
Elise Zipkin and Kayla Davis talked with Shelley Stall, Director of Data Leadership at AGU, in a Q&A focused on how our lab initiated an open science policy and implemented a reproducible code archive.
With a grant from the USGS Midwest Climate Adaptation Science Center, the lab is working with colleagues at Georgetown, USGS, and USFWS to shed new light on butterflies using 30 years of data.
Froniter in Ecology and the Environment‘s special issue on macrosystems ecology features two publications produced by lab members examining data integration and nonstationarity on macro-scales.
In Nature Ecology and Evolution, a team led by postdoc Erin Zylstra determined the importance of breeding season weather to the population dynamics of monarch butterflies in eastern North America.
Graduate student Alex Wright examined what falls through the gap between scientifically informed conservation decisions and their outcomes – and how to move forward to protect biodiversity.
The lab received an NSF IIBR grant to unite diverse data sources into a novel and flexible statistical modeling framework to assess the status, trends and dynamics of individual species and biodiversity.
In collaboration with Maria Natalia Umaña, the lab is evaluating the integrated effect of multiple traits to understand whole-plant functionality across environmental gradients with an NSF DEB grant.
In a Science cover article, Elise Zipkin, Grace DiRenzo, Sam Rossman and colleagues documented the collapse of a snake community after a pathogen wiped out most of the area’s frogs.
With the USGS and NPS, graduate student Alex Wright led a team in developing statistical models to understand why amphibians in mid-Atlantic National Parks have been declining.
Members of the lab led an activity at MSU’s annual Girls Math and Science Day entitled “Using math to save monarch butterflies” where middle school students learned how models can help with conservation.
Elise Zipkin, Brian Inouye, and Steve Beissinger organized a collection of papers discussing the latest approaches to integrate and collectively analyze data to assess population dynamics.
Postdoc Sarah Saunders led a team examining the multi-scale factors affecting the size of wintering monarch colonies in a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Sam Ayebare received a Beinecke Scholarship from The Wildlife Society and The Sperry Fund to study statistical model development and applications to conservation in the Albertine Rift.
Graduate student Alli Sussman led a collaborative team to examine common methods for determining animal hotspots and found that the most popular methods can produce vastly different conclusions.
Postdoc Grace DiRenzo led a study showing that after a chytrid pandemic in El Copé, Panama, the remaining amphibians developed the ability to coexist with the deadly fungus a decade later.
José Ribeiro led a team in evaluating the factors affecting amphibian distributions, creating a guide to help land-use development and efforts to conserve amphibians in a fragmented rainforest.
Funded by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the lab is collaborating with USFWS and USGS partners to model seabirds for the Gulf of Mexico Marine Assessment Program for Protected Species.
Postdoc Sarah Saunders leads a study to determine the factors limiting recovery of the threatened piping plover population in the Great Lakes by developing an integrated population model.
Elise Zipkin was awarded an NSF Macrosystems Biology Early Career Award to study the factors affecting monarch butterfly declines with a multi-scale, continental-wide modeling framework.
Alli Sussman’s waterbird research and Sarah Saunders’s piping plover project were highlighted in The MSU Museum’s exhibit – Michigan Bird Conservation Stories: Pigeons Past to Plovers Present.
Postdoc Christie Bahlai leads development of teaching modules for best practices in open, reproducible, and accessible science using a grant from the Mozilla Science Foundation.
Postdoc Sarah Saunders awarded the MSU’s Postdoctoral Excellence in Research Award for her outstanding achievements in research, and her accomplishments in teaching and outreach.
Elise is one of seven early career fellows elected by the Ecological Society of America in 2017. Fellows are chosen for advancing the science of ecology and showing promise for future contributions.
Postdoc Sam Rossman led development of a novel modeling approach – estimating population abundance and demographic rates from relatively easy to collect presence-absence data.
Postdoc Sarah Saunders led a study to estimate and predicts monarchs on Ohio and Illinois summer breeding grounds based on climate conditions during the spring breeding season in Texas.
The world is filled with difficult ecological problems. The goal in our lab is to address these issues by developing modeling techniques that can lead to solutions for even the most daunting challenges.
