The people behind the science.

Dr. Joshua Twining

Josh is a population ecologist with broad interests in how wildlife populations are monitored and managed. His research spans the drivers of mammal and bird distributions and population dynamics, carnivore conservation and management, and the interactions among species that shape both. One thread runs through all of it: quantitative methods, developed and applied in close collaboration with the agencies, growers and communities who need the answers, and aimed at outcomes that work for both people and wildlife.

Josh joined Oregon State University in November 2024. He leads the Applied Quantitative Ecology Lab, teaches mammalogy, wildlife in agricultural ecosystems and applied hierarchical modelling, and serves as Statistical Innovations Editor at Ecology.

Dax Morfin

Dax studies the abundance and demographics of coastal marten in one of their last remaining strongholds in the Oregon Dunes. He uses scent-detection dogs to conduct scat surveys and combines non-invasive genetics with spatial capture–recapture models to estimate how many animals there are, and test hypothesized mechanisms that underpin their abundance and survival to inform future conservation and recovery plans. He is co-advised by Dr. Taal Levi.

Jessalyn Ayars

Jessalyn's research examines how species interactions and habitat combine to shape population-level outcomes. For her dissertation she works on fishers, bobcats and cougars in southern Oregon, evaluating broad-scale habitat use, fine-scale movement, and dietary overlap and predation to understand what these interactions mean for fisher conservation. She graduated from Carleton College in 2021 and held a post-baccalaureate fellowship at the University of New Mexico and the USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station before joining OSU.

Austin Nash

Austin studies the population dynamics of the gray-tailed vole in the Willamette Valley: what drives its booms and crashes, and what role disease and movement play. His work combines long-term live-trapping, disease monitoring, and biologging in open spatial capture–recapture models to extend our knowledge on the ecology of this endemic species and help the valley's growers predict when and where the next population outbreak is going to occur.

Noelle Foster

Originally from Boise, Idaho, with a BS from Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, Noelle studies post-fire ecology, using passive acoustic monitoring, point counts and remote cameras to understand how birds and mammals respond to wildfire and land management in burn scars outside Roseburg. She is co-advised by Dr. Melanie Davis. Outside research she loves time with her community and outdoors: playing sports, running, hiking and birding.

Aaron Henderson

Aaron studies the distribution of great horned owls and their interactions with barred owls, applying occupancy and multi-species models to recordings from a network of autonomous recording units. He is co-advised by Dr. Damon Lesmeister of the USDA Forest Service.

Tessa Chesonis

Tessa studies non-invasive methods for monitoring wildlife, from optimising remote-camera survey design for coastal marten in northern California to testing airborne environmental DNA as a way of detecting terrestrial wildlife communities. Before joining the lab she earned an MRes in Wildlife Conservation at the University of Southampton, studying feeding-patch selection by large grazers in Zimbabwe. She is interested in tools that directly support wildlife management and conservation.

Mackenzie McCoy

Mackenzie is developing landscape-scale occupancy and abundance estimation tools for western gray squirrels using camera traps, non-invasive genetics, and hierarchical models. She is developing standardized sampling protocols for agencies using simulation-based power analyses, and working to update distribution maps for a range of little-known small mammal species.

Dr. Wes Binder

Wes did his PhD at Oregon State University studying multi-species interactions between cougars and wolves in Yellowstone National Park. Now he leads the cougar component of our southern Oregon carnivore project with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife: capturing and GPS-collaring cougars each winter, and working out how they share the landscape with bobcats and fishers.