Faculty Profile
Eliezer Gurarie
Assistant Professor
Department of Environmental Biology
206 Illick Hall
Profile
PhD, University of Washington, 2008
Quantitative wildlife ecology, co-production of knowledge, animal movements, spatial ecology, habitat use, behavior, cognition, population ecology, community ecology, statistical methods, mathematical modeling, remote sensing, predator-prey interactions, wildlife disease.
Assistant Professor
Potential graduate students or post-docs are encouraged to email me if interested in joining a dynamic and diverse research lab exploring fundamental features of wildlife ecology.
Lab website
Research summary
The world is incredibly complex and dynamic. This is true, too, for the particular biotic and abiotic environments that all animals exist in. Food resources alone can be patchy or cryptic, can appear and disappear, sometimes even run around themselves. Yet, animals manage (mainly) to navigate, survive, reproduce, and persist. At the broadest level, my research addresses the question: How!?
To that end, and with countless collaborators & students, I apply a wide range of overlapping approaches. We develop statistical tools for the analysis of animal movements, survival, and behavior. We develop and explore theoretical models to frame questions and explore scenarios. And - perhaps most importantly - we try to collect and analyze field data in insightful and creative ways.
Several major current research projects include:
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Fate of the caribou: Migratory caribou movements, behaviors and populations, with emphasis on the effects of climate change and human development across northern Canada and Alaska. This work centers local and Indigenous knowledge and concerns, combining movement, survival and monitoring data with next generation remote sensing - of snow and ice, of vegetation, of temperatures and winds - to draw links to the dramatic demographics of an iconic species in the Arctic.
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Cognitive movement ecology: Exploring through theory, conceptual development, and innovative empirical analysis the role that spatial memory, learning, and sociality shape the way animals use space.
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Coexistence ecology: Drivers, mechanisms and structure of coexistence and competition (direct and apparent), with a special focus on meso-carnivores (coyote, bobcat, fisher, fox, raccoon, marten) in New York and neighboring states.
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Predator-prey disease dynamics: What is the impact of (selective) predation of wolves on white-tailed deer in the slowing the spread of Chronic Wasting Disease in the upper Midwest?
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Statistical tools: Development of analysis tools (with “fun” names like smoove, marcher, cyclomort, TuktuTools) to facilitate ecological inference from complex data, in particularly movement and survival.
My Google Profile Page has up-to date links to peer-reviewed publications.
(formal) Education
2008 - Ph.D. in Quantitive Ecology and Resource Management at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA.
2000 - D.E.A. (M.S. equiv) in Environmental Geosciences at the Centre Européen de Recherche et d’Enseignement des Géosciences de l’Environnement, Marseille, France
1998 - B.S./B.A. in Physics and Literature at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH.
Lab members
Dr. Ophélie Couriot (post-doc)
... is a wildlife ecologist focusing on the response of wildlife to global change. In particular, changes in movement behaviour of animals to human-induced changes to the climate and their environment. Ophélie investigates mechanisms across several scales: from the individual to the population, with a particular focus on barren-ground caribou in the North American Arctic.
She completed her PhD at the University of Toulouse (France) under the direction of Dr. Mark Hewison, Dr. Nicolas Morellet (National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment, France [INRAe] and Wildlife Ecology and Behavior [CEFS] laboratory), and Dr. Sonia Saïd (The National Office of Hunting and Wildlife [ONCFS]), studying the impacts of spatiotemporal variation in resource and risk distribution on movement and activity patterns of two large lowland herbivore species in Europe: roe deer and red deer.