Partners & Consultants Working to Conserve Large Landscapes and Wildlife Corridors
Partner Links:
University of Montana Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Policy: www.cnrep.org
The Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative: www.y2y.net
Lincoln Institute of Land Policy: www.lincolninst.edu
Roundtable on the Crown of the Continent: www.crownroundtable.org
WesternEnvironmental Law Center: www.westernlaw.org
Wildlands Network: www.twp.org
Western Transportation Institute Road Ecology Program
Great Northern Landscape Conservation Cooperative: www.nrmsc.usgs.gov/gnlcc
Consultants:
Melly Reuling has worked on a wide variety of conservation projects in both East Africa and the Northern Rockies. Her work in conservation started in Tanzania and Kenya where she conducted a research project on elephant migration routes around Lake Manyara National Park. Her research led to the initiation of community conservation projects around national parks to find solutions to the elephant-human conflict. After living in East Africa for more than 20 years she relocated to Bozeman, Montana with her family. In Montana she has worked on white bark pine and climate change issues, as well as wildlife corridor and migration projects. Melly is currently working to promote coexistence between ranchers and carnivores in the Northern Rockies. She comes from a ranching and farming family and combines an understanding of the landscape with a love of wildlife. Melly can be reached at mreuling@africanenvironments.com .
Leslie Bienen (DVM, MFA) has worked as a research and communications consultant on a wide variety of wildlife and human health issues. She is currently a principal investigator on a project entitled “Connectivity, Isolation, and Disease Dynamics: Trade-offs in Recovering Bighorn Sheep Populations”, a multidisciplinary effort using a 15-year set of disease, mortality, and radio collar data from individually marked bighorn sheep in Hells Canyon, ID which evolved from the project “Climate Change, Wildlife Corridors, and Health Consequences in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem”. Leslie’s other research has focused on relationships between wildlife disease and movement of animals over landscapes, and on diseases cycles among people, wildlife, and livestock. She has worked on rabies in Nepal, trans-disciplinary investigation of emerging diseases, snowshoe hare fertility in the Rocky Mountain West, and writing projects on conservation medicine and ecosystem health. She has been a published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Orion, Open Spaces and Conservation. A full list of her publications is available at www.lesliebienen.com.
Erica Fleishman (B.S., M.S. Stanford University, Ph.D. University of Nevada, Reno) is a researcher at the John Muir Institute of the Environment, University of California, Davis. She focuses on application of conservation science to management of public and private lands in the western United States with work such as explaining and projecting the responses of animals to changes in land cover, land use, and climate. Erica has coauthored curricula on applications of remote sensing to environmental sciences and ecological modeling and has participated in the science process for multiple Habitat Conservation Plans and Natural Community Conservation Plans in California. She is editor in chief of Conservation Biology and serves on the editorial boards of Global Ecology and Biogeography and Ecography. Erica can be reached at efleishman@ucdavis.edu.
Raina Plowright is disease ecologist (PhD), wildlife veterinarian (BVSc Hons) and epidemiologist (MS). Her research interests include: conservation impacts of infectious diseases, ecological drivers of disease emergence, and climate change impacts on infectious disease dynamics. Raina’s multidisciplinary training allows her to integrate approaches across specialties and combine fieldwork, modeling and laboratory analyses to understand disease dynamics in wildlife. Raina is the recipient of the Australian Fulbright Fellowship, the Australian Centenary Fellowship and the David H. Smith Fellowship in Conservation Research. She currently works on emerging infections of bat origin and bighorn sheep pneumonia and can be reached at: rplowright@gmail.com