Mathias Tobler, PhD
San Diego Zoo Global
Mathias Tobler serves San Diego Zoo Global as an Associate Director in the Population Sustainability group. As a wildlife ecologist, he has a strong interest in the population and spatial ecology of large mammals and the development and application of new technologies and analytical methods for wildlife studies. He has an extensive background in tropical ecology with many years of research experience in the Peruvian Amazon. He also has a strong quantitative background and is interested in the application of new statistical methods such as multi-species occupancy models and spatial capture-recapture models to the analysis of camera trap data.
Chris Sutherland, PhD
Centre for Research into Ecological & Environmental Modelling – University of St Andrews
Chris Sutherland is a Reader in Statistics at University of St Andrews in Scotland. He is interested in movement, dispersal and connectivity, specifically understanding how large-scale biological patterns emerge as a result of how organisms use space at a variety of spatial and temporal scales. His work involves developing biologically realistic statistical models for observational data collected at all levels of organization – typically using hierarchical models. Chris’s research balances methodological development with a strong focus on the application of these tools to biological systems to solve real-world problems.
Andy Royle, PhD
United States Geological Survey
Andy Royle is a Senior Scientist at USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. He holds a BS in Wildlife Management from Michigan State University and a PhD in Statistics from North Carolina State University. At Patuxent, he is engaged in the development of statistical methods and analytic tools for animal demographic modeling, statistical inference and sampling wildlife populations and communities. His current research is focused on hierarchical models of animal abundance and occurrence, and the development of spatial capture-recapture methods and applications. He has authored or coauthored five books on quantitative analysis in ecology, including the recent book Applied Hierarchical Models (2016, with Marc Kéry).
Gates Dupont
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Gates Dupont graduated from Cornell University in 2019 where he gained an interest in quantitative ecology through his research at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. After graduating, he was a summer fellow at the San Diego Zoo's Institute for Conservation Research working on this project with Dr. Mathias Tobler. Currently, he's a Masters student with Dr. Chris Sutherland at UMass Amherst where he's developing optimal sampling design methods for spatial capture-recapture modeling, which will be applied to a similar range-wide analysis of snow leopards.