Heatherlee is an undergraduate in Wildlife Conservation and Management. She is interested in ecology, science communication, and the conservation of vertebrate animal populations—especially canids and arboreal mammals. She is a Doris Duke Conservation Scholar.
Heatherlee is doing research on the effects of anthropogenic mortality on wolves and characterizing the role of demographics. Her research asks: (1) is anthropogenic mortality additive or compensatory to natural mortality? (2) how many individuals can be hunted sustainably? and (3) does it matter which individuals are killed? She is using 30 years of data on Greater Yellowstone wolves taken from state and federal annual reports. This research is important because characterizing demographics will help us gain insight into what drives differences among populations of social carnivores and how they may respond to management practices.
Heatherlee is a Doris Duke Conservation Scholar in the School of Natural Resources and the Enviroment. As a Scholar she participated in weeklong training with other DDCS's at the USFWS Conservation Training Center in West Virginia in 2015, followed by summer field work assisting with montiroing grey hawk colonization in southern AZ and monitoring the movements and activity of a recovering desert bighorn sheep population. In the summer 2016 she will be working with the Arizona Game and Fish Department on the Mexican Wolf Recovery Project. Activities include assisting with the Mexican Wolf Predation Study, trapping and collaring wolves, and mitigating livestock depredations.
Heatherlee will graduate with a Bachelors of Wildlife Conservation in May 2017, and she already has her sights on potential graduate advisors across the country. After graduate school, she hopes to continue doing conservation research and to create meaningful opportunities for public involvement.
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