UC Davis experts: Animal conservation and extinction
UC Davis faculty members from a variety of disciplines are available to discuss issues related to animal conservation.
- Conservation of animal populations
- Veterinary identification
- Animal poachers and conservationists
- Human density and mammal extinction
Conservation of animal populations
Marcel Holyoak, a UC Davis associate professor of environmental science and policy, is an expert on the ecology and conservation of animal populations. He can discuss how populations are influenced by development, fragmentation and other habitat changes, and by the introduction of invasive predatory species. His research group currently studies a threatened insect species in the Central Valley of California, the valley elderberry longhorn beetle, to assess how management practices and habitat changes influence the beetle's survival. Contact: Marcel Holyoak, Environmental Science and Policy, (530) 754-7046, maholyoak@ucdavis.edu.
Veterinary identification
Wildlife geneticist and veterinarian Holly B. Ernest, associate director of the Wildlife Unit at the Veterinary Genetics Laboratory of the School of Veterinary Medicine, can discuss how DNA typing techniques can be used to identify individual animals, verify parentage, analyze kinship, quantify genetic diversity, examine genetic patterns in populations and investigate genetic susceptibility of populations to wildlife diseases. Dr. Ernest is interested in various aspects of conservation genetics. Her 2003 study examining the genetic structure of the mountain lion shows that California populations of mountain lions are discrete, and there are large genetic differences in mountain lion populations between regions. Contact: Holly B. Ernest, Veterinary Genetics Laboratory/Wildlife Unit, (530) 754-8245, fax (530) 752-3556, hbernest@ucdavis.edu.
Animal poachers and conservationists
Historian Louis Warren is an expert on animal poachers and conservationists in the 20th century. Besides teaching and writing about environmental history, Warren is a scholar of Native American history and can talk about their relationship with animals. Warren wrote The Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (1997), which won the Western Heritage Award for Outstanding Non-fiction Book from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center. Contact: Louis Warren, History, (530) 752-1633, lswarren@ucdavis.edu.
Human density and mammal extinction
Anthropology professor Alexander Harcourt can talk about the relationship between human density and extinctions of large mammals. He has studied large mammal extinctions in national parks, including those in California. “We showed that human density around Western parks correlated with rate of extinctions in the parks. I would say that's a finding very directly relevant to California's increasing human population,” Harcourt says. He studies the biology of extinction, conservation biology and the evolutionary biology of both human behavior and primate behavior. Contact: Alexander Harcourt, Anthropology, (530) 752-0670, ahharcourt@ucdavis.edu.
Media contacts:
- Sylvia Wright, UC Davis News Service, (530) 752-7704, .
- Claudia Morain, UC Davis News Service, (530) 752-9841, .
Last updated January 22, 2004
