Laura Prugh, an associate professor of Quantitative Wildlife Sciences with the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, shares about her pursuit to understand connections in the environment. On this episode of FieldSound, Prugh’s work with the critically endangered Kangaroo Rats is highlighted. Known as the “ecosystem engineers” of the Carrizo Plain National Monument in Southern California, Kangaroo Rats play a crucial, complex role in their environment.
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Since their protection under the Endangered Species Act, wolf populations have been making a comeback in the continental United States. Conservationists have argued that the presence of wolves and other apex predators, so named because they have no known predators aside from people, can help keep smaller predator species in check. New research shows that in Washington state, the presence of two apex predators — wolves and cougars — does indeed help keep populations of two smaller predators in check.
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Chelsea Wood is an Associate Professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. She is a leader in the ecology of parasites and pathogens in freshwater and marine ecosystems, the ecological drivers of parasite transmission, and human impacts on parasites in a changing world. Wood discusses the fascinating world of parasites, their “Rube Goldberg-esque” life-cycles, and her recent study – the world’s largest and longest dataset of wildlife parasite abundance – that suggests parasites may be especially vulnerable to a changing climate.
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John Marzluff is a professor of wildlife science in the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences and renowned researcher studying the relationships between birds and humans. In 2022, Marzluff was named American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow, honored for advances in our understanding of how humans impact birds, and for communicating the importance of birds to the public.
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A new study from the University of Washington has found that forest ecosystems may be facing more profound ecological impacts due to wildfires than has previously been documented. The study, published in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography, shows that as wildfire activity increases with climate change and more forests face multiple wildfires within a short period of time, overlapping fires are changing forest resilience.
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