Tabitha Hughes published the first paper from her dissertation – and from our collaborative elk project with the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission. The work establishes the basic spatial ecology and drivers of space use and seasonal movements of elk in Nebraska. See the open access publication and press release from UNL here!
Paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320725003520
Press release: https://news.unl.edu/article/scientists-study-movement-of-elk-in-agricultural-landscapes
March 2025: The Wildlife Society did a really cool write up on our research on coyote-badger hunting relationships. Check it out! It contains a link where anyone can report sightings of coyotes and badgers traveling together!
https://wildlife.org/wild-cam-watch-coyotes-hunt-with-badgers/
January 2025: 2025 is off to a great start with multiple new papers out from our lab by:
Kyle Dougherty in Ecology Letters:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ele.70035
Jake Harvey in Biological Conservation:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320725000126
Me in Ecology:
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecy.4492
December 2024: Some great posts from a) my colleagues at the National Park Service and b) the IUCN canid specialist group on our collaborative paper on canid social ecology recently published in Ecology. Read/see the posts here:
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/insights-canid-social-groups.htm
February 2024: Our new paper in Journal of Applied Ecology about mortality in the Ontario wolf-coyote hybrid zone was featured in the Applied Ecologist’s Blog. Read the post here:
November 2023: Our lab flag football team – Smashmouth Ecology – made a deep playoff run. We reached the championship game after a crazy latenight overtime win in the semi-final. We came up short in the final game but it was a great first season and we’ll be back for more next year!
June 2023: We had a couple more well deserved awards in the lab recently. Emma won the Kaufman Research Award from the American Society of Mammalogists to support her work on the coyote-badger cooperative foraging relationship. This is a great honor and a big help to Emma’s project.
Read more about the award and Emma’s work here: https://newsroom.unl.edu/announce/snr/16076/89971
October 2023: Tabitha attended the Central Plains Mammalogists meeting in Omaha and presented some of her preliminary findings on our elk project. She crushed it and was awarded a prize for best PhD presentation!
In June 2023, Jasmine and I visited DC to attend the International Urban Wildlife Conference. Jasmine presented her first oral presentation (LA coyote spatial ecology) at a major conference and also a poster on her MS work on foxes and coyotes in Lincoln. She knocked it out of the park and was awarded “Best Poster Presentation”! Congrats Jasmine – impressive work in her first year as a graduate student!
March 2023: Our new paper on statewide mountain lion mortality in California is out in PNAS. Congrats to Kyle Dougherty and our whole coauthor group in California and beyond. This one was an amazing collaborative effort!
Read the official press release here
October 2022: I joined Gaye Clemson on her podcast “Algonquin Defining Moments” to talk about my PhD work with wolves in and around Algonquin Park in Canada. A fun trip down memory lane as well as a reminder of all the remains to be done in this fascinating system. Click below to listen!
https://algonquinparkheritage.podbean.com
April 2022: Jake Harvey was awarded the prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to support his MS research in our lab on predator-prey interactions, spatial ecology, and energetics of mountain lions in San Francisco’s North Bay area. Way go Jake – and well deserved!!
10/11/2021: Our new paper was published on spatial ecology of mountain lions in greater Los Angeles led by Seth Riley and with Jeff Sikich of the National Park Service. Check out P22 on the cover of JWM!
12/8/2020: New paper published on resource selection at dens and rendezvous-sites by wolves, coyotes, and hybrids in Ontario led by my colleague and friend Teresa Oliveira! Our paper was the cover article!
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2.3320
7/23/20: Congratulations to Erin Wood for successfully defending her MS thesis, “Space use & resource selection of bighorn sheep ewes in a prairie badlands population”
BENSON LAB 