Erin Netoskie

An ornithologist at heart, my love of birds began at the National Aviary in my hometown of Pittsburgh, PA. My passion for wildlife has grown into a career, not only of birds, but frogs and desert tortoises too! I am broadly interested in terrestrial ecology, animal behavior, and applied conservation methods.

I completed my undergraduate degree in wildlife conservation at Juniata College in central Pennsylvania with a double major in German. I received my master’s from the University of Hawaii at Hilo in tropical conservation biology and environmental science where I studied the ʻōmaʻo, an endemic thrush, by creating behavioral landscape models for individuals that paired vocalization and location data across their home ranges. Over the years, I also worked in Vienna, Austria studying foot-flagging frog behavior and monitored Mojave desert tortoises with USGS in southern California.

Currently, I am a PhD student being co-advised by Dr. Connor Wood of the Yang Center and Dr. Zach Peery at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. I am studying the impact of landscape disturbances, such as fire, drought-related tree mortality, and forest management efforts on woodpeckers in the Sierra Nevada using acoustic data from autonomous recording units (ARUs) collected by an ecosystem-scale monitoring project that began in 2021.

In my free time I enjoy hiking, paddle boarding, and old lady crafts like cross-stitching.