506 Seminar

Spring 2025

Scheduled for: Fridays 1:30-2:30 pm in TLC029

Zoom | Meeting ID: 828 5924 0108 Passcode: WLF506-25

Jan. 24: Dr. Michael Quist | Recording
Dr. Michael Quist is a Professor of Fisheries Management and Assistant Unit Leader of the USGS Idaho Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit. All his research focuses on answering questions directly applicable to fisheries management, while also addressing basic ecological questions. The impetus for his research emerges from issues and concerns related to native fish conservation and sport fisheries management. He frames his research questions and approaches in a manner that has relevance to the general scientific community and natural resource managers. Although he has interests in all aspects of applied fisheries ecology and management and have conducted research across a diversity of aquatic systems,

Feb. 7: Dr. Jerod Merkle | Recording
Dr. Jerod Merkle is an Associate Professor and the Knobloch Professor of Migration Ecology and Conservation in the Department of Zoology and Physiology in the College of Agriculture, Life Sciences and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming, He conducts quantitative research based in fundamental ecology and ecological theory and addresses the needs of wildlife managers and conservation practitioners. He strives to make a lasting impact on the field of wildlife ecology and management. More specifically, he asks scientific questions and develops study designs to uncover novel and exciting aspects of wildlife ecology, co-produces research with his partners that creates reliable knowledge for managing and conserving wildlife and their habitat, provides analytical, scientific, and data support and guidance to his partners, and communicates his findings to researchers, managers, policy makers, and the public.

Feb. 21: Dr. Tim Parker
Dr. Tim Parker is a Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies and Co-Chair of Environmental Studies at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Tim’s ongoing projects involve cultural evolution in a landscape context, reliability of inference in ecology and evolutionary biology, and responses to climate and disturbance in a semi-arid grassland. He has also worked on projects focused on patterns and processes in avian sexual selection, forest patch area and edge effects on forest songbirds, and avian brood parasitism and nest abandonment. His research often includes undergraduate students in the field work and publishing results in the peer-reviewed literature with him.

March 7: Dr. Christine Parent
Dr. Christine Parent is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Idaho. Her approach to research is to observe present-day patterns of biodiversity to infer past evolutionary processes, and to test those processes with manipulative experiments in laboratory populations. She uses field observations, comparative analyses, laboratory experiments, and molecular phylogenetics integrated with theoretical modeling. Island systems (natural or experimental) are often the focus of her research. Currently her research focuses on how organisms respond when confronted with novel environmental conditions. She has been using two complementary approaches: (1) the study of large-scale spatial and temporal patterns of diversification (mainly using island systems such as oceanic islands, kipukas, and limestone islands), and (2) the study of real-time evolution in experimental systems. She is affiliated with the Institute for Bioinformatics and Evolutionary Studies (IBEST), the Institute for Modeling Collaboration and Innovation (IMCI), and the Center for the Study of Evolution in Action (BEACON) at the University of Idaho.

March 28: Dr. Brad Shaffer
Dr. Brad Shaffer is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and the Director of the UCLA La Kretz Center for California Conservation Science. His research interests include evolutionary biology, ecology and conservation biology of amphibians and reptiles. His recent research projects include comparative phylogeography of amphibians and reptiles in California and the central U.S., systematics of freshwater turtles and tortoises in Australia, California, and the rest of the globe, and conservation genetics of endangered California amphibians and reptiles. Recently, he has focused on the ecology and genetics of the California tiger salamander, an endangered species native to central California grassland habitat.

April 11: Dr. Briana Abrahms
Dr. Briana Abrahms is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. She is also part of the Center for Ecosystem Sentinels at the University of Washington. Her research integrates global change biology with behavioral and spatial ecology to study the effects of environmental variability and change on vertebrate populations. By bridging theories and methods across terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, her research seeks to answer questions that enhance our understanding of and capacity to manage the natural world. Her work combines fieldwork, modeling, and interdisciplinary approaches, centering on three themes: (1) understanding the drivers of large-scale animal movements, (2) linking environmental processes and change to animal behavior, individual fitness, population persistence, and community dynamics, and (3) applying spatial and behavioral ecology to inform wildlife management and conservation.

May 2: Dr. Rachel Cook
Dr. Cook is a large ungulate ecologist with the National Council for Air and Stream Improvement (NCASI). Her primary research interests include foraging ecology of large ungulates, modeling habitat-ungulate interactions, assessing nutritional limitations in free-ranging ungulate herds, and evaluating the accuracy and applicability of surrogate techniques used to measure nutrition. Her work focuses the mechanism that links habitat conditions, and habitat change, to the performance of ungulate populations. She has conducted research on a variety of ungulate species, including Rocky Mountain and Roosevelt elk, Shiras moose, mule deer and, in Canada, woodland caribou. She has developed strategies that integrate findings from captive-animal research on physiology, nutrition, and bioenergetics with wild-animal field research to capitalize on the strengths of both. Captive studies involved the largest herd of tame elk in the world in the 1990s and 2000s and, more recently, tame caribou that were used in British Columbia and Ontario. These studies were combined with wild-animal studies across most of the western states (elk) and in British Columbia, the Northwest Territories, and Ontario (caribou).