Erica F. Stuber | X-SCALE ECOLOGY
Assistant Unit Leader - USGS UT Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit
Assistant Professor - Utah State University Department of Wildland Resources & Ecology Center
PROJECTS
Individuals
Individuals, even within single populations, often display consistent differences in behavior in various contexts (so-called animal personality). I am interested in 'personalities' in behaviors such as boldness, exploration, sleep, and space use, and their inter-correlations across contexts, which are expected to have fitness consequences.
Variation in the phenotypic composition of groups may influence trajectories of population dynamics and community interactions.
Populations
Individuals' habitat matching and habitat preferences result in population-level signatures of species-environment relationships which we can use to inform species distribution models and predict the impacts of land use and climate change on species-ranges and space use.
Identifying and predicting the spatial scales of species-environment relationships, and the repeatability of these relationships, is an on-going methodological and theoretical area of my research.
Communities
Understanding the environmental relationships of multi-species communities may inform areas of species overlap, whether for predicting species co-occurrence, identifying diversity hotspots, or spatial conservation planning.
I work with designed, and citizen science (e.g., eBird) data collection efforts to conduct broad (100s-1000s) multi-species investigations to understand patterns and scale-dependency of biodiversity.
Methods Development & Data Fusion
Increasingly complex ecological questions and data sets often require novel statistical methods or creative re-purposing and combination of existing methods from other disciplines. Part of my research is dedicated to developing improved statistical methods, particularly regarding issues of spatial scale in ecological modeling, and developing analytical techniques to combine data from vastly different sources (high frequency camera-traps, mid-frequency field surveys, and low frequency individual-specific metrics).
Citizen Science & "Big Data"
The quantity of biological information provided by global citizen scientists is exponentially increasing (I use the term “citizen” to refer to citizens of the world and members of communities, rather than someone with citizenship, and citizen science to refer to the participatory, volunteer collection of observation-based data that can be used by professional scientists). These data have the potential to strengthen analyses of threatened or rare species (by adding observations to typically data-poor species), and increase the extent and resolution of information on wildlife species generally (citizen scientists collect data continuously and across the world) if we understand how to work with the data properly. I work on projects seeking to better our understanding of wildlife by leveraging citizen science and remote sensing data, including 'big data' sets and sometimes taking data science approaches.