Spencer R. Keyser, Ph.D.

I am an ecologist broadly interested in understanding how environmental change impacts biodiversity at various scales of biological organization, from individual species distributions to functional diversity. My work has largely focused on modelling biodiversity at regional and continental scales to understand how the environment structures animal assemblages. Most of my work has focused on avian assemblages, but I am broadly interested in the responses of biodiversity to environmental change.

A major theme of my research is leveraging large-scale, publicly available biodiversity data, such as participatory science datasets (e.g., eBird), to map, quantify, and understand the drivers of biodiversity patterns. In doing so, I rely heavily on remotely sensed environmental data, phylogenetic trees, and species’ trait databases to quantify and model multiple dimensions of biodiversity. My previous work has focused on a diverse range of topics including the impacts of climate and habitat change on coastal bird diversity, the importance of winter climate in structuring bird distributions and global biodiversity patterns, and the influence of seasonality on bird functional diversity across North America.

At the Yang Center, I am using a large-scale, bioacoustics monitoring program to explore the interaction of forest management and fire ecology on bird biodiversity patterns across the Sierra Nevada. Shifting baselines of fire behavior throughout the region over the last 200 years have placed novel pressures on the unique biodiversity in the Sierras. By investigating the role that forest management has on biodiversity in this rapidly changing environment we hope this work will provide valuable information to land managers for implementing holistic conservation plans for the region.