Research
Our scientific expertise is wide-ranging, including behavioral ecology, population dynamics, physiology, ecotoxicology, disease ecology, human-wildlife conflicts, human dimensions of natural resource conservation, marine ecology and habitat-population interactions.
Our wildlife faculty members work with a wide variety of animals: from salamanders and turtles to bats, squirrels, shore birds, raptors, game birds, deer and large predators such as coyotes, bears and tigers. The interests of our fisheries faculty range from endangered Roanoke log perch and nongame fish communities to conservation aquaculture for imperiled freshwater mussels and management of large game fish such as muskellunge, blue catfish, and arapaima. Our work occurs in Virginia, throughout the United States and in many countries around the world, including Mexico, Belize, Brazil, Indonesia, Botswana, Ghana, and Madagascar.
- Leandro Castello
- Castello's research program focuses on the ecology and conservation of fish and fisheries in relation to global change processes, with particular attention to tropical regions. Key topics of investigation are the impacts on fisheries caused by overfishing, pollution, hydrological alteration, and land cover change. Unlike programs based on specific topics, his program focuses on a broad range of fishery problems, seeking to identify research questions for which the answers have the potential to improve the state of affairs for fish resources and fishing communities. This goal is achieved by pursuing questions that can influence policy and adopting an interdisciplinary approach. This research program on fish and fisheries ecology and management often includes humans, adopts an ecosystem-based perspective, and makes use of various approaches from fields other than fish biology and fisheries science, including ethnobiology, resource governance, and policy analysis, among others.
- Francesco Ferretti
- Farretti is interested in characterizing the history of human impact in the ocean, understand how this impact has altered marine ecosystems, and develop solutions for a sustainable use of marine resources. His research spans from macro-ecology to applied management and conservation (I have a particular interest in sharks and their relatives). It focuses on dynamics from single species to whole ecosystems, and revolves around three main scientific approaches: 1) inferring ecological processes from limited and disparate data; 2) filling the data gap characterizing many ecological systems by exploiting unconventional sources of information; and 3) using data science methods, big data, and new technology to address pressing ecological issues and develop ocean solutions.
- Emmanuel Frimpong
- Frimpong focuses on the ecology and conservation of freshwater fishes, with emphasis on how anthropogenic alterations to habitats and landscapes differentially affect species as a result of differences in their life history traits and the nature of biotic, especially mutualistic interactions. Examples of specific landscape and habitat changes that have been the subject of recent and current research in my lab include agriculture and aquaculture, urban development, introduction of nonnative species, and climate change. A major theme in his research is explaining the determinants of fish distributions, predicting how the distribution of species will respond to anthropogenic changes to their environment, and developing management and conservation solutions. Frimpong's research extends to sustainable production aquaculture (especially in sub-Saharan Africa) as an alternative to overexploitation of natural fisheries to feed growing and increasingly urban populations in developing countries.
- Yan Jiao
- Jiao's research interests are to explain the nature of aquatic species and manage them as appropriately as we can in a probabilistic way. Specifically, Jiao is working on: population dynamics and stock assessment; risk analysis; fisheries management (decision analysis, adaptive management); fishery ecology; statistical computing. The types of models we work on include stock recruitment, statistical catch-at-age, matrix models, generalized linear/additive models, spatial-temporal modeling, hierarchical modeling, measurement error (error-in-variable) models, time series models, multi-species models, Bayesian modeling, quantitative risk assessment. Specific species of interest include of commercial and recreational fish species, species under conservation or invasive.
- Jess Jones
- Jones focuses on conservation biology of freshwater mussels, with an emphasis on: 1) Conservation aquaculture, 2) Restoration ecology and monitoring of populations, 3) Aquatic ecotoxicology, and 4) Conservation genetics. He is particularly interested in improving field and laboratory techniques to restore mussel populations to enhance the capability of the Department of Interior’s Natural Resource and Damage Assessment and Restoration (NRDAR) program, including applying small- and large-scale mesocosms to improve captive growing and experimental conditions for endangered mussels and fishes.
- Holly Kindsvater
- Kindsvater's research applies the science of evolutionary ecology to conservation and management of fisheries. She studies the evolution of fish species with complex life histories. Kindsvater uses demographic models to understand how biological differences interact with fishing, including fishing intensity and gear type. This information is critical for managing species sustainably and identifying threatened species.
- Beth Nyboer
- Nyboer is a freshwater fisheries ecologist whose work aims to understand how environmental change affects aquatic ecosystems and the human societies they support. Her research integrates concepts from applied conservation ecology and social-ecological systems theory and employs a variety of quantitative and qualitative methodologies to develop solutions to complex environmental challenges including biodiversity conservation, climate change adaptation, fisheries sustainability, and natural resource management. The three core themes of her research program are: 1) the ecological consequences of environmental change on fish and fisheries, 2) the impact of environmental change on fishing communities, and 3) how social and ecological knowledge is best communicated and integrated into environmental policy and practice.
- Kathleen Alexander
- Alexander's research program is directed at exploring and understanding the factors that influence the emergence and persistence of emerging and re-emerging diseases at the human- wildlife-environmental interface. Her program embraces a systems biology approach to ecosystem health integrated with public health, beginning within host - pathogen dynamics and extending to the livelihoods of communities living with wildlife, including the impact on ecosystem function and local communities themselves. Alexander's approach integrates critical crosscutting elements that can influence infectious disease dynamics such as culture and behavior, gender dimensions, and climate change.
- Willandia Chaves
- Chaves focuses on understanding factors influencing wildlife populations and how managers can manipulate those processes to meet their objectives. She conducts applied research investigating topics including wildlife-habitat interactions, predator-prey ecology, and ungulate ecology and management. Chaves is interested in how behavioral and physiological traits of individual animals link to demographic parameters and community interactions.
- Robert Cooper
- Cooper's research program applies genomic and computational tools to understand major threats to native biodiversity, including the introduction of invasive species, habitat destruction, fragmentation, and climate change. We work closely with managers at the state and federal level to identify and address pressing challenges in wildlife conservation. Much of our work has focused on the endangered California tiger salamander which is threatened both by habitat conversion and non-native hybridization with the invasive barred tiger salamander. In this system we have employed gene-expression studies to understand difference in thermal tolerance, constructed experimental ponds with varied hydrology, and built genetically-informed demographic models to simulate population viability in the face of invasive hybridization. These salamanders have large genomes 10 times the size of the human genome, with highly repetitive regions, making them an especially tricky non-model system to study genetically. As a result we employ a wide range of techniques to understand their biology. Cooper also develops new genomic techniques to address conservation needs, including rapid genotyping assays to scan large populations for non-native alleles.
- Ashley Dayer
- Dayer is a conservation social scientist. Her research program focuses on understanding people's and organization's conservation behavior, especially related to bird conservation, private lands habitat conservation, human-wildlife conflict, endangered species management, and citizen science. As part of this research, she explores the role that policy tools and educational interventions can play in influencing behavior. Much of her current research is part of interdisciplinary (social and natural sciences) teams and focused on bridging the implementation gap between science and conservation.
- Luis Escobar
- Escobar's research focuses on the application of ecology and biogeography to the study of infectious diseases. Classic biogeographic theories and methods, however, were not conceived to study host-parasite systems in infectious diseases. Therefore, his laboratory explored suitable theoretical frameworks and methods for investigating the linkages between environmental instability and disease dynamics. To quantitatively support new theoretical frameworks in disease ecology and biogeography, he studies a series of multi-parasite, multi-host diseases systems. To untangle effects of environmental instability on disease dynamics, he explicitly assess how diseases respond to climate and landscape change. Due to the unique niche that his research fills in biogeography, in many of these studies he often collaborates with multidisciplinary teams to develop novel computational tools that account for the complexities of host-pathogen disease systems and multi-scale analyses. Escobar categorizes his research in three focal themes, which in turn are the main lines of my academic program: 1) Diseases Biogeography, 2) Global Change and Infectious Diseases, and 3) Ecoinformatics.
- Mark Ford
- Ford studies land management (forestry, fire, and mining) and landscape interactions with wildlife habitat and species occurrence in the Southeast and mid-Atlantic. Currently, his work focuses on ecology and management of bats, Appalachian northern flying squirrels and spotted skunks. Ford is also interested in oak regeneration issues and high elevation red spruce restoration in the Appalachians.
- Bill Hopkins
- Hopkins' research focuses on physiological ecology and wildlife ecotoxicology, addressing pressing questions in both basic and applied science. From a basic science perspective, his interests are in the energy costs of various physiological and behavioral processes. From an applied perspective, Hopkins' goal is to understand how anthropogenic disturbances alter the ability of fish and wildlife to interact appropriately with their environment.
- Elizabeth Hunter
- Hunter is a vertebrate conservation biologist and landscape ecologist focusing on developing management strategies for at-risk species in the face of global change. Her research program combines field data collection on birds and reptiles with quantitative models that are tailored to management-relevant questions. She is particularly interested in the conservation and management of species in the face of climate change, ecosystem restoration through species reintroductions, and decision-making and habitat management for multi-species conservation.
- Sarah Karpanty
- Applied behavioral and population ecology; top-down and bottom-up drivers of population and community dynamics; climate change impacts on wildlife populations; shorebird and waterbird conservation; primate ecology; carnivore ecology; predator-prey interactions; tropical forest restoration; endangered species management.
- Marcella Kelly
- Kelly's research focuses primarily on carnivore population ecology, management, and conservation. She uses emerging and evolving techniques such as camera trapping combined with advances in population modeling to estimate population sizes and densities for elusive, hard-to-track, carnivores; non-invasive genetic sampling and molecular scatology to determine carnivore abundance, growth rates, genetic diversity, and gene flow across fragmented landscapes; Global Positioning System (GPS) collaring combined with landscape modeling to investigate carnivore habitat selection and fine scale movement across multi-use landscapes; and finally conservation physiology of captive black bears to better understand hibernation/torpor ecology and its potential link to human-wildlife conflict. Kelly works collaboratively with other population modelers, with geneticists, with wildlife conservation physiologists, with veterinarians, with agency biologists, and even with human physiologists to synergize data from multiple sources to advance our knowledge and understanding of large carnivores.
- Haldre Rogers
- Rogers is a tropical forest community ecologist and conservation biologist, motivated by a desire to understand and effectively address environmental problems. Her research investigates the impact of biodiversity loss on ecosystem services, with a focus on mutualisms and food web dynamics in tropical forest ecosystems. Much of the Rogers Lab research has been conducted on the Mariana Islands, where due to the introduction of the brown tree snake, Guam’s forests are now functionally without birds.