As a Ph.D. student, Stephanie is interested in the ecology of desert ungulates. She earned her BSc in Biological Sciences from the University of Notre Dame and then happily left the Midwest for the desert Southwest. Before coming to the UA, Stephanie spent four years working with Sonoran pronghorn as an employee of the Arizona Game and Fish Department, first helping to manage the captive breeding pen and then studying the efficacy of recovery efforts.
As the human population expands and encroaches on wildlife habitat, understanding the effects of human activity on wildlife is essential to making sound conservation decisions. Stephanie studies the anthropgoenic effects, including climate change, on the behavior, physiology, and demography in populations using resource-poor environments. Antipredator response play a central role in her research; many responses to human stimuli are likely to include changes in behavior or physiology with impacts on survival and reproduction but not necessarily direct mortality of individuals.
Understanding human impacts on wildlife is particularly important for recovery of endangered species such as the Sonoran pronghorn, a subspecies of American “antelope” unique to the Sonoran desert. Prompted by an increase in border activity during the past decade, Stephanie takes a noninvasive approach to examining the effects of human activity on Sonoran pronghorn roaming the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, and Barry M. Goldwater Range. She conducts point-counts of pronghorn, follows marked adults, collects scat and vegetation samples, and maintains a network ofcamera traps sites heavily used by people and pronghorn.
Stephanie’s field methods allow her to determine how the Sonoran pronghorn’s behavior, physiology, and demography may vary with anhtropogenic effects and recent climate change. With the help of technicians and volunteers, she assays scat samples to assess diet quality and stress levels. After calculating activity budgets, she will associate physiological and behavioral data with indices of human activity based on traffic documented by the camera network. Multi-species occupancy models will be be used to quantify covariation in occurence by people and pronghorns. Detection histories of marked and genotyped adults will feed into an integrated populatoin model with counts, group compositions, and fecal-hormone pregnancy estimates to better understand pronghorn population dynamics.
Conservation of wildlife along the U.S.-Mexico border has become ever more important as illegal human activity and associated law enforcement interdiction efforts have become commonplace in recent years. Effective management requires understanding of potential human impacts on these populations. This project will shed light on the role risk effects play in the demographics of desert ungulate populations subject to human activity, in addition to providing information that will facilitate recovery of Sonoran pronghorn.
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