Researchers

I’m the founder and Scientific director of Wildlife in Motion, a Tempe-based nonprofit focused on habitat restoration and biodiversity monitoring across the Madrean Sky Islands. Most of my fieldwork sits at the northern edge of the Sierra Madre, where the desert grasslands and oak woodlands of southern Arizona and northern Sonora knit together into one of the richest biological corridors on the continent.
The current work runs across a 24-site monitoring network spanning the borderlands: camera traps tracking mammal movement (including black bear gene flow across the Sulphur Springs Valley gap), dung beetle iDNA metabarcoding, arthropod malaise and UV trapping, and agave outplanting to support nectar-feeding bats. The through-line is connectivity — how landscape linkages function at different grains for animals of different body sizes, and what it takes to keep the Sky Islands stitched into the larger archipelago that runs south through the Americas.