Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program:
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

Originally from Marshalltown, Iowa Jason earned his B.S. in Wildlife Biology from the University of Montana in 2001. After a yearlong stint working with sea otters for the USGS in Central California, Jason returned to ornithological field research. He participated in research studies in Costa Rica (house wrens), New York (barn swallows), Florida (red-cockaded woodpeckers), Minnesota (American woodcock), California (cavity-nesting birds), and Maui (po'ouli capture team). He completed his M.S. in Ecology at University of Connecticut under Chris Elphick studying post-fledging ecology of saltmarsh sparrows. He completed his Ph.D. at Penn State in Ecology under Duane Diefenbach studying the population dynamics of grassland sparrows on reclaimed surface mines. . Using North American Breeding Bird Survey data to evaluate potential consequences of energy development and other land use changes on bird populations in the northeast Appalachian region Organisms are affected by processes at multiple scales—spatially and temporally. Quantifying the separate effects of those processes (e.g., fragmentation, succession, and habitat degradation) can be tremendously challenging as they tend to overlap in time and space. The North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) is often the only source of population status information for model development, and the continuing nature of the BBS makes it a potential data source for testing model predictions and assessing consequences of environmental chan...