Honorable Mention for the Outstanding Paper Award in Landscape Ecology

I was really excited to learn that a paper that I was an author on had been chosen for the Honorable Mention for the Outstanding Paper Award in Landscape Ecology by the US Chapter of the International Association for Landscape Ecology. Last month I attended the meeting in Baltimore, MD to accept this award on behalf of our team and got to meet some excellent folks and catch up with some friends.  The paper is entitled "Dilts TE, Weisberg PJ, Leitner P, Matocq MD, Inman RD, Nussear KE, Esque TC (2016) Multiscale connectivity and graph theory highlight critical areas for conservation under climate change. Ecological Applications 26:1222-1237." In their e-mail the awards committee wrote "Your paper provides a valuable contribution to the science of landscape ecology by providing a unifying, multi-scale framework and some valuable guidance for when and where to apply differing approaches for assessing species-specific connectivity. We were also excited by the application of graph theory to both climate change and land use change scenarios."   The photo above is me with Ross Meentemeyer taken by Jeff Hepinstall-Cymerman. Thank you US-IALE for this honor.

Monarch butterfly and milkweed models the western U.S.

Today Matt Forister and I presented the results of our habitat modeling work for monarch butterflies and milkweeds for the western U.S. I've been involved in this research now since January 2017 and am very excited about having some preliminary maps and models ready. The work is an extension of the 2015 habitat modeling effort by Madeline Steele while she was at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Our work is a collaborative effort by University of Nevada Reno, the Xerces Society, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and others. I'm excited to get to work with such an iconic species, and I hope that through conservation and societal awareness of pesticides we can halt the decline of one of the most beautiful insect species in the world.

Cheatgrass die-off paper is now in print

Our paper about remote sensing of cheatgrass die-off patches is now in print in Ecological Indicators. To read our paper click HERE or request a PDF from myself or one of the other authors.  Since this paper we've done more mapping of cheatgrass die-offs in Skull Valley of western Utah and have a new graduate student coming on board next month to take the die-off mapping to new heights.