Research

My main research interest is understanding the processes that shape species demography—abundance, survival, and reproduction—on a changing Earth. Below are a few of my research interests.

Current project: 

Acoustic Demographic Monitoring of Sierra Nevada Birds

As a Smith Postdoctoral Fellow in Dr. Connor Wood’s lab at the Cornell K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, I am developing and applying individual acoustic identification techniques to understand how birds of the Sierra Nevada are impacted by wildfire and fuels management.

The need for scalable population monitoring

Many bird populations are declining, but each local population faces its own mix of threats. However, gathering detailed data on local declines, threats, and conservation opportunities is challenging to do at scale. For example, bird banding can measure bird abundance, breeding success, and survival, but it is time-consuming, invasive, and difficult to scale. Alternatively, passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) can be deployed at large scales in locations of interest to achieve excellent spatial coverage, but it is generally used to detect species presence or absence rather than provide detailed information on population trends.

Individual animal monitoring from acoustics

To resolve the trade-off between demographic detail and spatial scale, I am developing acoustic methods to track indicators of birds’ population trends, including local abundance, reproductive success, and annual survival. While birders are familiar with identifying bird species’ voices, many people are surprised to learn that distinctive vocal features can identify individuals in a wide variety of species. In effect, voices can act like acoustic “fingerprints,” helping us track when individuals appear, survive, or disappear from populations over years of acoustic monitoring. 

Application: mitigating fire risk in the Sierra Nevada

I plan to use the acoustic mark-recapture method to understand how wildfire and forest management in California’s Sierra Nevada impact several indicator bird species, starting with the California Spotted Owl. In the Sierra, catastrophic wildfires have increased the urgency of fuels reduction techniques, such as prescribed burns and forest thinning. However, applying fuels reduction responsibly requires understanding how these treatments affect sensitive wildlife, a challenging task in the Sierra Nevada, where species’ responses to fire and fuels reduction can vary significantly depending on factors such as latitude and elevation. 

To understand local variability in population responses, I am applying acoustic mark-recapture techniques to the five-year, 1,500-site Sierra Nevada Bioacoustic Monitoring dataset. I will estimate species abundance and annual survival rates, then relate these rates to site-level data on fire, drought, and management to pinpoint the conditions under which bird populations thrive or decline in each region.