Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology
Wildlife management agencies are tasked with balancing problems of wildlife overabundance (e.g. damage to agriculture, nuisance) with problems of scarcity (e.g. risk of extinction, loss of ecosystem services) and citizens’ desires for hunting opportunities, wildlife viewing, and other wildlife-associated values. Population management decisions generally involve three steps: 1) determination of a population goal for the …
Characterizing biodiversity and understanding its consequences on ecosystem functioning are important challenges in the context of environmental change. Biodiversity encapsulates the condition and variations in a suite of compositional, structural, and functional attributes. Current methodologies for estimating biodiversity are expensive and time consuming and necessitates establishing less expensive methodology that can comprehensively characterize heterogeneity within …
Remotely Quantifying Aspen Genetic Variation Biodiversity is important to ecosystem functioning. Diversity at all levels – of soil biota, plant and animal species and their behavior, and the genetics of those species – provides ecosystems with the capacity to respond to changes in the environment. We are interested in characterizing multiple levels of biodiversity at …