Conservation
Most of my projects are focused on some aspect of population or community ecology, with conservation being a consistent theme among them. For others, an aspect of conservation is the main focus of the project. To this end, I have added to the quantitative framework by which potential management actions are evaluated and created analyses to suggest specific management actions. Recent examples are described below.
Population Viability Analysis (PVA), predicting the future state of a population, has been a mainstay for quite some time in conservation biology. However, as with many mathematical models, there have been objections to its use as it can be difficult to interpret and its output may be too uncertain to provide meaningful conservation recommendations. We added a simple quantitative method to the end of traditional PVA that incorporates uncertainty and can make the results of these models far more intuitive to understand. Our analysis explicitly predicts when management is expected to fail, succeed, or if it is not needed at all.
Photo from Steen et al. 2014 of x-rays showing hooks ingested by turtles.
In collaboration with David Steen, I am essentially using the above method in reverse to examine the effects of fish hook ingestion on freshwater turtles. Instead of evaluating how good a conservation action may be at recovering a population, we are using the method to evaluate how detrimental hook ingestion may be to the population viability of three species of turtles based on Steen's field studies (pictured). This study has been featured on LiveScience.
Along with Julian Avery, Curtis Burkhalter, and Kevin Aagaard, I helped conduct a meta-analysis on the effectiveness of seabird bycatch reduction devices (BRD) in long-line fisheries. We found that no matter where in the world they are being used or the target species of the fishery, BRDs greatly reduce the risk of a seabird dying by becoming hooked. We analyzed the data further and showed that BRDs also may increase the catch of target species, as fewer birds eating bait means more baited hooks entering the fishing zone.
Photo from phys.org