PROJECTS &
COLLABORATIONS

CURRENT & RECENT PROJECTS

WESTERN HEMISPHERE

CURRENT: Mountain Optimism – Connecting Sentinel Sites across the Americas’ Spine. This project (running through 2022-23) is interfacing with protected area managers from across half a dozen countries along the hemisphere’s high cordilleras. The effort is in conjunction with other conservation practitioners from Chile and Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, and Costa Rica and Mexico – also Canada, and USA; the goal being to formulate an optimistic future vision to implement a plan that shall unify conservation efforts at high elevation sites across the backbone of the Americas.

NORTH AMERICA

CURRENT: Canyons and deserts of Utah and Colorado to focus on recreational and disease impacts on a cultural icon, desert bighorn sheep (2019-2024); combining field ecology on bioenergetics with economy and land use patterns. (Support by BLM, Navajo Nation, and Denver Zoo)

CURRENT: Navajo Nation Lands – (2023-2025) Investigation of traditional domestic animal husbandry (sheep) methods as influencers for disease spillover to wild desert bighorn sheep; project with graduate student Jamie Begay whose ancestry brings 10,000 years of cohabitation on the landscape

CURRENT: Wrangell-St. Elias Ice Fields (Alaska) (2019-2023) and Crown of the Continent, Montana – Glacier NP; as above – contrasts between peri-glacial dependent species of melting ice caps to connect The Americas; this effort is based on a mountain goat foci

Western Arctic – (2008-2021) Chukchi Sea populations of musk ox and climate change; this comparative project is contrasting reproductive and demographic performances and testing hypothesis about vital rates and biotic and abiotic divers of variation in western Alaska

SOUTH AMERICA

CURRENT: Patagonia Ice Cap (Chile & Argentia); 2017-2024); Contrasts between peri-glacial dependent species of melting ice caps to connect The Americas (by iconic species) – huemul foci with field work on colonizing and stagnant huemul populations

ASIA

Eastern Arctic (Wrangel Island, Russia) 2012-2018; non-invasive monitoring of muskoxen to develop ecological baselines and assessments of interactions between muskoxen and polar bears; collaboration and fieldwork with Russian Zapovednic biologists

Laos – Annamite Range (2022-2024) Nakai-Nam Theun NP, with PhD student Minh Nguyen – focus on snaring crisis as impacting Large-antlered muntjac, serow, sambar

Bhutan – (2012-2014) Northwestern Himalayas of Bhutan (Jigme Dorje National Park), as science adviser and field ecologist for conservation and ecology project of Bhutan’s national mammal, the takin, through association with Ugyen Wangchuck Institute of Conservation and Environment

Western Tibet (Qinghai & TAR – China)– (2010-2014); Efforts aimed at capacity building and censuses of wild yak in southern Chang Tang Reserve and in Qinghai’s Kekexili Reserve; collaboration with WCS-Lhasa Office, with field surveys, grant writing, and hosting of Tibetan Ecologist Dr. Aili Kang to University of Montana.

Mongolia (2005-2014) – advisor on a possible project on khulan (an endangered equid in 1999) and subsequently on migration and land use patterns in the endangered saiga antelope, including surveys of populations and their habitat in the Sharga-Mankhan Nature Reserve, Khar Us Nuur National Park, and unprotected lands.