WARNING UNDER CONSTRUCTION!!!

Curiosity about the natural system drove me to change my educational pursuits from medicine to ecosystem interactions in my early 20s. I have always had an interest in animal behavior and thought at first I might work with marine mammals, but I took an ornithology class that thoroughly changed my interest to trying to understand avian life history strategies. Imagine having a 27 gram bird put in your hand for the first time and having your instructor ask, "Where do you think they go when they leave here?". Add in the concerns about climate change and we have fundamental issues because only about 15% of the world's migrant species actually have information to answer that question. I learned early on that conservationists and land managers are operating with a considerable lack of species- and habitat-specific information needed to create effective management strategies. In addition to the gaps in knowledge, managers need information on how aspects of climate change such as sea level rise, changing air and sea surface temperatures, and rapidly changing precipitation patterns will add variation to species and habitat information that has already been established.

 

What interests me?

Generally asking those questions of how species can respond to environmental variation and therefore climate change

1. Understanding the underlying influences of fine scale movement on population dynamics- upscaling individual movements to population-level dynamics

2. Understanding perceptual limitations to species-specific responses to aspects of climate change and continuing anthropogenic-driven habitat loss and fragmentation (e.g., sea level rise, storm event flooding, changes in ambient air and sea temperatures, loss of stopover habitat along the migration flyway, land use and global climate change interactions)

3. Thermal limitations on ground-nesting birds through behavioral adjustment (niche tracking versus adaptation to local influences)

4. Dietary plasticity and opportunism as it relates to a species’ ability to mitigate environmental variation in food resources 

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Education

I completed a dual B.S. in Marine Biology and Zoology at Humboldt State University in Northern California, a M.S. in Ecology from San Diego State University, and a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Oklahoma. ​I have since expanded my research repertoire to include satellite and GPS telemetry (Davenport et al. 2016, Goodenough and Patton 2019, and Goodenough 2022), molecular techniques to inform population connectivity for migratory species (Goodenough et al. 2024), and the use of dietary studies designed to highlight tradeoffs bird  species can develop to mitigate climate change impacts to reproduction (Goodenough et al. 2023).

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