Spencer Keyser
Postdoctoral Fellow
Expertise
Macroecology • Community Science • Species Distribution Modeling • Functional Ecology
At the Cornell Lab of Ornithology I am using bioacoustics data to understand how the interplay of fire and forest management practices impacts biodiversity across public lands in the Sierra Nevada. My research is focused on quantifying and understanding how environmental change impacts species across ecological scales, from individual species distributions to biodiversity patterns.
I believe that understanding the processes that drive patterns in biodiversity is the key to effectively managing and conserving it. Biodiversity is a complex concept that includes the diversity of species, but also their ecological functions and evolutionary histories, and I focus on multiple dimensions of biodiversity in my research. In doing so, I often couple large, publicly available datasets on species, their traits, and their evolutionary histories with satellite remote sensing data to understand and model biodiversity patterns.
My previous work examined the role of winter climate and seasonality in driving bird distributions and functional diversity across North America. At the Cornell Lab I aim to study biodiversity management, which is a complicated topic as species exhibit idiosyncratic responses to environmental change. My goal for this work is to provide managers in fire-prone ecosystems with information targeted at facilitating more holistic management practices for biodiversity.
Education
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wildlife Ecology
M.S., University of Texas at Austin, Marine Science
B.S., University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wildlife Ecology
Favorite Bird
As a native Floridian, I have an innate fondness for Florida’s wetland ecosystems. Some of these ecosystems are also home to my favorite bird, the Seaside Sparrow, a saltmarsh obligate songbird that I studied during my masters.
