Summary:

I am broadly interested in the ecology and conservation of birds. I am currently a postdoctoral fellow in the UCLA La Kretz Center for California Conservation Science and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and advised by Dr. Morgan Tingley and Dr. Allison Shultz. My research is focused on characterizing the many ways that wildfire smoke may impact the health, behavior, and distributions of birds in the western United States. In my research, I use community science data and field measurements to study how urban air pollution and wildfire smoke impact birds and our observations of them. A major goal of my work is to identify the places and resources birds use when it is smoky and recommend specific conservation actions to shepherd birds through ever-smokier fire seasons.

I completed my Ph.D. in the Quantitative Ecology Lab at the University of Washington in 2021, focused on understanding how smoke impacts our ability to detect birds. This work was a direct extension of my master’s thesis, completed at the UW–Madison Center for Sustainability & the Global Environment under the mentorship of Dr. Tracey Holloway.

In addition to my research on air pollution impacts on birds, I have contributed to studies in urban avian ecology and seabird ecology. In 2020, I led a community science program to monitor how changes in human mobility during COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns influenced bird activity in cities throughout the Pacific Northwest. I am immensely proud that our program engaged ~900 volunteers in four states and British Columbia. Our findings were published in Scientific Reports in 2022. In 2018–2019, I contributed to the development of a long-term seabird monitoring program in Tetiaroa, a remote atoll in French Polynesia. This program continues today, offering a unique opportunity to investigate seabird movement patterns, monitor survival, and evaluate how local populations are impacted by microplastic pollution and rat eradication efforts.

Current research activities:

1) linking data from eBird with high-resolution chemical transport models to explore how wildfire smoke impacts bird distributions

2) monitoring birds before, during, and after wildfires and prescribed burns to investigate the effect of smoke exposure on bird health and behavior

3) leading Project Phoenix, a regional community science project to study how wildfire smoke impacts bird behavior, specifically use of bird feeders and bird baths

4) collaborating with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County to develop new techniques for use of bird specimens as historical records of wildfire smoke and urban air pollution

In The Field: