Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2022-2023)

Human activity threatens biodiversity, undermines access to natural resources, and erodes the value of ecosystem services. This activity is intensifying in many landscapes, motivating a growing demand for the restoration of critical ecological processes across broad spatial scales. Knowledge of how human activity affects two ecological processes - predation and connectivity - for large mammals is an important part of restoring landscapes. Through these processes, large mammals can alter the flow of biomass and energy across the landscape, mediate the frequency and impact of natural disturbance (e.g., fire, flooding), and constrain the spread of disease outbreaks. In some ecosystems, large mammals are not simply by-products of restoration, they are agents of restoration.

Identifying the ecological context in which predation and connectivity have large-scale impacts on the ecosystem has been a major challenge for ecologists. Many studies on large-mammal ecology rely exclusively on correlative evidence and weak inference. This lack of rigor has increased scientific uncertainty, leading to spirited debates about the ecological role of large mammals and the management actions needed to restore ecosystems. Consequently, there are knowledge gaps in community and spatial ecology that have critical implications for landscape restoration.

My research will help fill these gaps by quantifying the impacts of landscape change – resource extraction, urban development, and transportation infrastructure – on large-mammal food webs. Because of their expansive movements, rarity, and long-life spans (i.e., relative to smaller taxa studied in laboratory systems), quantifying predation and connectivity for large mammals necessitates the collection of field data over large spatial and temporal scales. At the same time, the mechanisms underlying species interactions occur at an individual scale. As such, my research integrates both expansive (landscape) and individual (behavioural) scales of ecological inquiry to understand the mechanisms giving rise to the dynamics of large mammal food webs. Specifically, the methods used in this research combine field experiments, GPS-telemetry, agent-based models, and high-resolution satellite imagery to measure: (a) the impact of infrastructure on carnivore (cougar, wolves, bear)-ungulate (elk, deer) interactions in the Rocky Mountains; (b) the impact of forestry practices on carnivore-ungulate interactions on Vancouver Island.

This research will create knowledge in two key areas of ecology: (a) it will help identify the ecological context in which predation exerts primacy over other drivers of ecosystem function in food webs comprised of large mammals and their prey; (b) it will articulate the practices required to restore predation and connectivity in human-modified landscapes.