Achievements

Publications and achievements submitted by our faculty, staff, and students.

Faculty Matt Johnson, Brent Campos, Vitek Jirinec, Steve Railsback Wildlife

Wildlife professor Matt Johnson delivered an oral presentation at the International Ornithological Congress held in Brazil in August 2010. The presentation was co-authored by wildlife students Brent Campos and Vitek Jirinec, and Math adjunct faculty Steve Railsback. Their research involves modeling how bird movements across a landscape may influence the provisioning of ecosystem services in agricultural settings.

Submitted: August 19, 2010

Student Ryan Kalinowski, Matt Johnson Wildlife

Wildlife undergraduate student Ryan Kalinowski published his Honor's Thesis in the international ornithological journal, The Condor. His thesis and paper is entitled, "Influence of Suburban Habitat on A Wintering Bird Community in Coastal Northern California" and appears in the Vol 112, pages 272-284. His advisor Matt Johnson is a second author. Ryan is now a graduate student in the Natural Resources-Wildlife program.

Submitted: August 19, 2010

Faculty Micaela Szykman Gunther, Ho Yi Wan Wildlife

Drs. Micaela Szykman Gunther and Ho Yi Wan received a $170,000 grant from the National Council for Air and Stream Improvement (NCASI) to support a distribution study on the marten and fisher, two closely related members of the weasel family that are both species of special concern. The project aims to assess potential shifts in the species’ distributions after wildfires in Lassen County, and will support two Department of Wildlife graduate students. Findings will determine if certain management strategies or habitat types are more resilient to fire, potentially serving as refugia for martens and fishers.

Submitted: November 10, 2022

Student Frank Juma Ong'ondo, Frank Fogarty III, Peter Njoroge, and Matt Johnson Wildlife

Wildlife graduate student Frank Juma Ong'ondo and his collaborators Drs. Frank Fogarty and Matt Johnson from Humboldt Wildlife, and Dr. Peter Njoroge from the National Museums of Kenya published a paper entitled "Bird abundance and diversity in shade coffee and natural forest in Kenya" in the journal Global Ecology & Conservation. Open access link here.

Submitted: November 4, 2022

Faculty Matt Johnson Wildlife

Wildlife faculty member Matt Johnson has secured a new grant ($659,987) from the Agricultural Research Institute to investigate the use of nest boxes for bluebirds and swallows for insect pest control in winegrape vineyards. The 3-year project is in collaboration with researchers at UC Davis (Dr. Daniel Karp) and UC Riverside (Drs. Erin Wilson-Rankin and S. Houston Wilson), and it will fund a post-doctoral researcher and multiple undergraduate students from Cal Poly Humboldt, along with a PhD student at UC Davis. The research will occur in Napa Valley.

Submitted: November 4, 2022

Student Molly Parren, Daniel Barton, and Barbara Clucas Wildlife

Molly Parren, MS graduate in Wildlife, published results from her MS thesis research, "Drought and coyotes mediate mesopredator response to human disturbance" in the ESA open-access journal Ecosphere, co-authored with Cal Poly Humboldt faculty Drs. Daniel Barton and Barbara Clucas and CDFW scientists Dr. Brett Furnas and Misty Nelson. This work addressed how California's extreme drought and coyotes in 2013-16 influenced interactions between bobcats, kit foxes, raccoons, and human disturbance at 585 study sites throught California's Central Valley and Mojave Deserts.

Submitted: October 21, 2022

Student Logan Hysen Wildlife

Logan Hysen, M.S. student from the Department of Wildlife, was selected to be the recipient of a $1,000 scholarship given by the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of the California Association of Environmental Professionals. The scholarship supports students pursuing a career in the environmental field. Logan is conducting research on environmental impacts on northern spotted owl for his thesis.

Submitted: October 13, 2022

Student Logan Hysen, Danial Nayeri, Ho Yi Wan Wildlife

In Summer 2022, Logan Hysen and Danial Nayeri, graduate students of the Wildlife Department, were awarded a $1,000 research grant from the California North Coast Chapter of the Wildlife Society. This grant will be used to conduct a pilot research on northern spotted owl prey species in recently burned forest landscapes. They will be conducting the research under the supervision of Dr. Ho Yi Wan.

Submitted: October 6, 2022

Faculty Frank Fogarty Wildlife

Frank Fogarty (Wildlife) and colleagues developed a novel community model to examine how habitat area and its fragmentation affect breeding bird communities in the Great Basin desert. Their work was publish in Ecological Applications and can be accessed with the following citation:

Fogarty, Frank A., Yen, Jian D. L., Fleishman, Erica, Sollmann, Rahel, and Ke, Alison. 2022. “ Multiple-Region, N-Mixture Community Model to Assess Associations of Riparian Area, Fragmentation, and Species Richness.” Ecological Applications e2698. https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.2698

Submitted: August 23, 2022

Faculty Frank Fogarty and Ho Yi Wan Wildlife

Dr. Frank Fogarty and Dr. Ho Yi Wan received a $89,000 grant from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) to support research into the habitat requirements of Lewis’s Woodpecker, a woodpecker species that are the top priority Oregon Conservation Strategy species for the East Cascades. The project will examine the relationship of habitat variables, including wildfire and vegetation, on Lewis's Woodpecker populations in the Oregon East Cascades. Findings will help managers better understand the declining species, and inform efforts to maintain or restore suitable habitat. Collaborators will include ODFW biologist Kalysta Adkins and the East Cascades Audubon Society.

Submitted: August 16, 2022

Faculty Matthew Johnson Wildlife

Dr. Matthew Johnson received a grant from the CSU Agricultural Research Institute to support a study on whether the criteria for Wildlife Conscious Certification (WCC), a new eco-label being developed for cannabis farms, truly benefit wildlife. Dr. Johnson’s project will implement WCC-recommended habitat enhancements on cannabis farms, and examine their impact via wildlife surveys. Project collaborators include Jackee Riccio (Executive Director, Cannabis for Conservation) and Wildlife Associate Professor, Dr. Barbara Clucas.

Submitted: April 8, 2022

Faculty Ho Yi Wan Wildlife

Dr. Ho Yi Wan and his lab were featured on The Wildlife Professional, the flagship magazine of The Wildlife Society. The article spotlights Dr. Wan's career path and his advocacy in advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion. View article here: https://bit.ly/WAN_TWP2022

Submitted: March 23, 2022

Student Adam Mohr, Jon Ewanyk, Owen Hardy, Justin Windsor, Erin Zulliger, Carrington Hilson, Micaela Szykman Gunther, William T Bean Wildlife

Graduate students in Dr. Tim Bean's class on advanced spatial modeling produced a manuscript from a class project recently published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin entitled "A multi-metric movement model for identifying elk parturition events".

Submitted: March 23, 2022

Faculty Nicholas Kerhoulas (Wildlife) / Lucy Kerhoulas (Forestry & Wildland Resources)) Wildlife

Dr. Nicholas Kerhoulas and Dr. Lucy Kerhoulas have been awarded a $25,000 grant from the Save The Redwoods League to support their research on the distribution and abundance of the Sonoma tree vole, a rodent species that is both endemic to California and a California Species of Special Concern. Their study will determine if restoration thinning and/or the use of nesting platforms affect Sonoma tree vole abundance, and compare Sonoma tree vole abundance and genetic diversity between primary and second-growth redwood forests. Project findings will help inform land management and conservation practices.

Submitted: March 23, 2022

Faculty Ho Yi Wan and Danial Nayeri Wildlife

Dr. Ho Yi Wan and his MS student, Danial Nayeri, published the article, "Comparison of habitat suitability and connectivity modelling for three carnivores of conservation concern in an Iranian montane landscape" in Landscape Ecology. Other authors of the article include Alireza Mohammadi, Kamran Almasieh, and Mohammad Ali Adibi. This study increases our understanding of the efficacy of protected areas in protecting corridors and connectivity for carnivores in Iran.

The article is available here:
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-021-01386-5

Submitted: February 3, 2022

Staff Seafha Ramos Wildlife

Dr. Seafha Ramos, NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Biology, hosted in the Wildlife Department, published an article, "Understanding Yurok traditional ecological knowledge and wildlife management" the Journal of Wildlife Management.

The paper can be found at https://wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jwmg.22140.

A media story by The Wildlife Society can be found at: https://wildlife.org/jwm-integrating-yurok-knowledge-and-wildlife-management/?fbclid=IwAR2QwFZq9PPjyE2ZyGI4JlDW7P41_IMw2QhKCLlr-Q1Fgjf

Submitted: February 1, 2022

Student Allison Huysman and Matt Johnson Wildlife

Former graduate student Allison Huysman and advisor Matt Johnson (wildlife) published a paper in Ecology & Evolution. The paper documents how barn owls responded to wildfires in Napa Valley.
https://wildlife.humboldt.edu/sites/default/files/johnson/pdf/huysman_j…

Submitted: December 17, 2021

Student Brooks Estes, Matt Johnson Wildlife

Former Environment & Community Master's student Brooks Estes and her advisor Dr. Matt Johnson (Wildlife) recently published a paper in the journal California Fish and Wildlife about winegrape growers' environmental values. URL: https://nrm.dfg.ca.gov/FileHandler.ashx?DocumentID=195584&inline

Submitted: November 16, 2021

Faculty Dan Barton Wildlife

A new cooperative grant from the Bureau of Land Management to HSU will support graduate students working with Wildlife faculty member Dan Barton to study conservation of seabirds and the Trinidad Seabird Protection Network around Trinidad Head and Sue-Meg over the next three years.

Submitted: November 2, 2021

Faculty Dan Barton Wildlife

Working with colleagues from four other institutions around the country, Wildlife faculty member Dan Barton co-organized and facilitated a workshop "Active Learning in the Wildlife Classroom: Engaging students beyond the field" with 30 participants at the annual meeting of The Wildlife Society in early November 2021.

Submitted: November 2, 2021