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I was hired at the university as an Ungulate Habitat Ecologist.
Research that I'm doing right now with my graduate students in my lab is understanding
the effects of recolonizing carnivores, like
restored grey wolves, or recovering grizzly bears, or mountain lions,
on these cornerstone ungulate species like elk.
It's not a very easy question to ask: Are carnivores actually having the effects that
we think they're having, or people think they're having, on elk populations?
The state wildlife agency is struggling to understand the effects of recovering
carnivores, like wolves in this case, on elk, and are under intense public scrutiny.
These agencies have a management issue
and I think because of the strong track record of the Wildlife Biology Program,
Dan Pletscher and his students, Bart O'Gara and his students, they come to the Wildlife Biology Program.
One of the things we have to remind ourselves about
universities is that we don't actually manage wildlife or conserve wildlife.
All we do is teach, and train, and do research on how to do it.
When I sort of look at our undergraduate students and graduate students, where they go
and where their careers take them, I'm blown away at how much luck they have.
And the reason, I think, that our students end up having such success
getting jobs with real hands-on, applied wildlife management agencies
is because of the strong collaboration that we have at our heart
in pretty much all the undergraduate and especially graduate research that we do.
So, for me I couldn't imagine, you know, teaching in a better place than Missoula
where all we have to do in the Wildlife Biology Program
is sort of open our window and point at one of the most pressing conservation issues facing wildlife.
I really think that in some ways Montana is sort of a proving ground.
A lot of the things have become so advanced and so technologically driven,
but fundamentally, those kinds of technologies aren't really I think what conservation needs
or what students need to really learn what it takes to do wildlife conservation.
So, until we sort of understand that
wildlife conservation is really -- should be approached in a community-based conservation
framework that sees to the needs of the people who live with the wildlife, we really won't
be that successful. And I think that these are theoretical ways of understanding
human and wildlife conflict, and human and carnivore conflict, that I
learned here first hand by studying wolves, say, but that actually
can translate immediately to help a Bhutanese wildlife manager understand:
"How do I keep the tigers on the landscape"?
There's no reason why the things we learn about wolves here shouldn't help us manage
endangered carnivores around the world.
We're not afraid at the Wildlife Biology Program, we've never been afraid, really, of asking really hard,
challenging questions that challenge the status quo.