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

Having grown up in the Vermont woods, I enjoy studying natural resource management and in my free time I enjoy soccer, outdoor sports, and spending time with my wife Lauren and our dog Bailey.. In general I am interested in the ways we model nature through the use of quantitative ecology in order to understand and better manage natural resources. My current research is focused on the development of a wildlife database and applying structured decision making, adaptive management and population modeling techniques to state wildlife populations to benefit management practices. We developed a database for the state of Vermont to centrally store the data the state collects and uses to chronicle and manage wildlife populations. We will then be able to identify populations with the data available for the more sophisticated decision analyzes and identify areas of data gaps the additional studies may fill. My PhD research will assess the current and future status of bobcat and fisher populations and their habitat in Vermont. The objectives are to model the abundance and distribution of these species, evaluate how management can be improved based on a structured decision making and adaptive management framework, and determine the impact of projected development and climate change on these species. Current and future habitat status will be determined using presence-only species distribution models and using those model results to evaluate changes in species distribution that may ...