Integration of demographics and genetics to understand wildlife responses to changing habitats, climate, and human disturbance

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Wildlife populations are experiencing unprecedented changes in habitat, climate, and human activities. Some of the most urgent ecological questions relate to understanding how animals will respond to these changes. Understanding species responses requires multiple approaches and integration across disciplines in wildlife ecology. This proposal presents a plan for integration across methodological approaches to address priority research questions in population ecology, habitat selection, and landscape genetics.******My students and I seek to understand how habitat, climate, and human activities interact to influence the distribution and abundance of wildlife populations. In this proposal, I outline a study of large-scale research in landscape genetics, focusing on greater sage-grouse, that ranges from the study site to the entire distribution of the species. Landscape genetic approaches are integral to understanding how landscape features affect the functional connectivity of populations. Landscape genetic studies seldom include data on the population demography of the study species and demographics can have important impacts on genetic structure. Animals select resources at multiple scales and the influence of multiple scales on structural connectivity has been a fruitful and illuminating area of research. My proposed research will parallel this line of inquiry by examining how scale influences landscape genetics and the integration of population demographics. This research represents an unprecedented opportunity that promises to provide novel insights into the relationships among population demography, genetics, and landscapes. ******Population cycles have long been of interest to ecologists and are ubiquitous across animal taxa from insects to ungulates. However, despite extensive research, the mechanisms driving population cycles are still poorly understood at southern latitudes. This proposal will examine and quantify the mechanisms driving large-scale population fluctuations and correlations. We will develop models to assess support for 5 mechanistic hypotheses underlying population cycles. These include density dependence, climate, habitat, management, and alternative prey. The proposed research will assess and fill important gaps in our understanding of these large-scale and ubiquitous patterns of population fluctuations.******A significant part of the value of this research lies in assembling the individual pieces of a landscape together into an integrated, spatially and temporally explicit whole. My application of landscape genetics and other sophisticated modelling approaches to wildlife ecology provides unique insights into the processes of population fluctuations, habitat use, and functional connectivity and the rare opportunity to explore a comprehensive assessment of wildlife responses across large spatial scales.