One of my primary professional goals is to educate the public about environmental and ecological issues through extension work.  What is extension?  In a nutshell, extension is the art of synthesizing, integrating, and translating research information and expertise from the land-grant university system to the public.  Many of our most important issues in society today are not understood or effectively evaluated by the community-at-large, and I truly believe that the success of any conservation or environmental management plan is dependent on whether people understand or see a need for such a plan.

My focus is on wildlife issues, but this category is quite broad and connected to many different environmental and ecological issues.  Working with variety of Florida public and private organizations, extension agents and specialists, research scientists, and people, I am developing many educational programs to get the word out about wildlife issues.  I use all media (print, TV, radio, internet), and I communicate with the public through talks, presentations, outreach activities, phone, and email.

Outreach activities open the lines of communication and help build “bridges of understanding” and promote “win - win” solutions.  In Florida, I have strived to communicate with homeowners and developers about the importance of maintaining natural backyards; however, people were reluctant about the idea that natural yards attract arthropods.  This fear often hindered the creation of natural backyards, and it motivated me to write and publish a humorous but scientific book about insects (That Gunk On Your Car: A Unique Guide to North American Insects - Ten Speed Press).  Stemming from this book’s publicity, I have appeared in many TV and radio productions about insects and urban wildlife; some of the more notable ones include Disney/MGM, PBS/WNET, ABC NEWS, The Tonight Show, NPR, and BBC.  These experiences have taught me how to develop interesting and informative educational programs and how to communicate and engage the public by using a variety of educational media.  My most recent project, a Living Green PBS series, has produced its first ½ hour pilot show.

I am currently heavily involved with designing and managing “green communities.”  In conjunction with UF’s Program for Resource Efficient Communities, my grad students and I are working with several developers to establish natural resource conservation strategies in communities that are billed as “green” developments.  I have extensive experience in working with homeowners, developers, and policymakers on ways to manage and design residential developments.  In particular, I am developing on-site environmental educational programs that will help homeowners manage their homes, yards, and neighborhoods for natural resource conservation (see Web site – http://www.wec.ufl.edu/extension/gc/harmony).

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I plan to continue conducting research on the responses of wildlife to human-dominated systems and on the responses of humans to wildlife in these systems.  Humans are a primary force in shaping ecosystems, but we know very little about the interaction among humans and natural communities; this paucity of knowledge will greatly hurt the goal of preserving biological diversity in Florida and across the globe.  My research focuses on discovering how human-altered landscapes affect animal and plant abundance and distribution.  Central to my research program is an emphasis on urban ecology, conservation biology, and human dimensions of wildlife.

As mentioned above, my grad students and I are working with several developers to establish natural resource conservation strategies in communities that are billed as “green” developments.  This involves survey research on peoples’ attitudes, knowledge, and behavior on natural resource conservation.  I have several studies that are in progress and one that has looked at whether people in “green” communities understand natural resource conservation.

Much of my research is related to the cross-scale effects of human-transformed landscapes on animals and plants.  Addressing the effects of both limited- and broad-scale human impacts on landscapes involves people from a variety of disciplines.  In addition to building relationships with researchers from a variety of fields, I work closely with education specialists, architects, planners, and other social scientists.  One of my major interests is to develop new ecological theories and methodologies that integrate the social and natural sciences.  I feel this is a primary step in attaining a more fundamental understanding of urban and other human-dominated ecosystems.  Such integrative studies explicitly provide homeowners, planners, and government officials alike with the tools and the practical knowledge needed to address a variety of issues.

I have explored the scales at which changes in urban vegetation structure primarily affect the abundance of different avian species.  At the level of the landscape, two questions have plagued modelers and conservationists alike: 1) at what scale do different bird species respond to critical landscape structure and, 2) in terms of the sizes and the quantities of structural objects at each scale, what is the spatial arrangement necessary to attract certain species?  I utilized the sizes of birds as a way to simplify cross-scale analyses.  Theoretically, animals of different sizes are responding to landscape structure at different scales (e.g., a wren responds to much smaller features in a landscape than does a hawk).  Results indicate that body size is an approximate indicator of the scales at which birds respond to landscape structure, but results were most useful in establishing the difficulties researchers face in designing and interpreting such empirical, broad-scale habitat selection studies.

At Arizona State University, my research involved the design of long-term monitoring studies of bird and insect communities in the Phoenix metropolitan area.  These projects involved a variety of scientists and were truly a team effort.  I also continued with my interest in determining the scales at which birds respond to urban landscape structure.  One question that I explored was whether birds respond to different land use categories.  Birds were surveyed in a variety of key habitats within the Phoenix area and land use was found (in most cases) not to be a predictor of the types of species that occur in an area.  Land cover (e.g., vegetation structure) was probably the overriding factor that influences birds when they select a habitat.  In addition, I initiated a long-term study on the distribution and abundance of pollinating insects in the metropolitan area (primarily Hymenopterans).  Very little is known about the effect of urban landscapes on this most important taxon, and we are collecting insects in a variety of sites across the valley.

Beliefs and values of a wide range of people affect urban landscape structure both at fine and broad scales.  It is important to identify the human-mediated processes that produce pattern at each scale and connect this to how different species respond to structure across scales.  The outcome of such studies will greatly enhance our ability to design human-dominated environments that minimize the impact on animal and plant diversity.  In addition, operating at a landscape level inherently addresses questions and solutions with a high degree of uncertainty and surprise.  Using the philosophy of adaptive management, which employs the scientific method to address difficult management issues, one of my goals is to test a variety of management strategies that could address biodiversity loss in human-impacted landscapes.  Such studies would not only test the success of different strategies but could reveal the underlying causes for species loss in a human-impacted area.

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