Clinton Leach, a new research assistant professor and an Assistant Unit Leader with Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, will speak on Wildlife Research.

Monitoring and managing population spread, in the context of both species recovery and invasion, presents a number of quantitative challenges. Inference often requires linking multiple disparate data sets, and additional data are often costly to collect. Moreover, management decisions frequently require interpretable inference on ecologically meaningful quantities. Bayesian hierarchical methods, together with mechanistic models, offer a cohesive framework to address many of these challenges. We apply these approaches to understand the spread of sea otters across Glacier Bay, Alaska and the resulting changes in the nearshore community induced by sea otter predation.

Bio Sketch
Prior to joining the Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, Clint was a postdoc at Colorado State University, where he also did his PhD in ecology. Clint is broadly interested in statistical ecology and mechanistic modeling, and his recent work has focused on sea otter predator-prey interactions in Glacier Bay, Alaska, and brown treesnake movement in Guam.