eESPM
ESPM ESPM
CNR UCB
 

Justin Brashares

Assistant Professor
Ph.D.  
  

13 Mulford Hall
Berkeley, California 94720
brashares@nature.berkeley.edu
office: 510-643-6080   lab: 510-643-6080   fax:  510-643-5438

Web site         Recent publications      People
   Dr. Justin Brashares portrait
 

Research Summary

The catastrophic global decline of biodiversity is widely recognized as among the most pressing problems we face as a society. The biological, economic and social consequences of depauperate oceans, tundras, savannas and forests remain unclear and in desperate need of study. My research attempts to understand how our consumption of wild animals and conversion of natural habitats affects the dynamics of animal communities and the persistence of populations. Work in my group extends beyond traditional animal conservation to consider the economic, political and cultural factors that drive and, in turn, are driven by, changes in wildlife abundance and diversity. Through these efforts, my group strives to propose empirically-based, interdisciplinary strategies for biodiversity conservation. Much of this work and, specifically, my research efforts in ESPM can be placed within three foci:
  • Community and population ecology of wildlife in altered ecosystems
  • Causes and ecological consequences of wildlife utilization
  • Landscape planning and monitoring for wildlife conservation

 
Ghanaian wildlife ranger with waterbuck carcass
Ghanaian wildlife ranger with waterbuck carcass

Research Interests

  • Community ecology and population dynamics of wildlife in altered ecosystems


    • Fully “intact” or “naturally functioning” communities survive in disturbingly few areas on the globe. In most places, complex and dynamic forces such as competition, predation, parasitism and mutualism have been distorted by human actions and associated declines or increases of individual species. That even the sagest ecologists are seldom able to predict the outcome of perturbations to natural communities highlights both the daunting complexity of ecosystems and the need to understand more about the basic functioning and resilience of animal interactions. To the theoretical ecologist, the widespread, unanticipated trophic cascades and other non-linear community responses to species decline provide unparalleled opportunities to tease apart complex ecological relationships. However, to the conservation biologist, these “knock-on effects” or “aftershocks” of extinction are cause for alarm and suggest communities are easily pushed over thresholds beyond which irreversible “ecosystem meltdown” is one result.

    In my research, I aim to quantify the impact of harvest and habitat loss on vertebrate populations and to characterize the reverberating effects of population change on community dynamics and ecosystem function. My lab’s work on these issues takes place in the Sierras and Central Valley of California, in six reserves in Ghana, on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, in two reserves in Tanzania, and, recently, in Etosha, Namibia.

  • Causes and ecological consequences of wildlife utilization


    • The harvest of wildlife for human consumption increasingly is perceived as the primary threat to wildlife persistence in Africa, Asia and much of South America. Nevertheless, surprisingly little is known about the socio-economic and other factors that drive people to hunt in these regions, and even less is known about the short and long-term impacts of hunting on wildlife populations and communities. Research in my group attempts to fill some of the many gaps in our understanding of hunting’s causes and consequences with field and community-based studies in Ghana, Tanzania, Madagascar and Cameroon.

  • Landscape planning and monitoring for wildlife conservation


    • Land planning for wildlife conservation existed long before it was advocated by Aldo Leopold in the 1930’s, but the very recent development of tools for visualizing, quantifying and modeling landscapes and animal distributions has revolutionized this field. Nowhere is this revolution clearer than in protected area planning and studies of wildlife connectivity, which have become thriving disciplines of their own thanks to inferences made possible by GIS, GPS and remote sensing. Practitioners in these fields quantify wildlife-habitat interactions and, in so doing, illuminate past, present and future patterns of wildlife occurrence and movement across vast, changing landscapes. This relatively new area of research also allows spatially-explicit planning for wildlife monitoring and provides practical strategies for land management and habitat protection while considering “real world” trade-offs for people and economies.

    Research in my group employs the tools of Landscape Ecology to characterize animal movements, design and test corridor networks among protected areas, quantify interactions between people and wildlife at local and continental scales, and work with stake-holders to design and evaluate locally-based strategies for wildlife monitoring. Our data collection takes place in Tanzania, Ghana and California, but we apply our questions to sites across the globe.

 
<em>Marmota vancouverensis</em>
Marmota vancouverensis
Recent publications

Danielsen, F. et al. 2009. Local participation in natural resource monitoring: a characterization of approaches. Conservation Biology 23, 31-42.

Prugh, L.R., K. Hodges, A.R.E. Sinclair & J.S. Brashares 2008. Effect of habitat area and isolation on fragmented animal populations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 105, 20770-20775.

Wittemyer*, G., Elsen, P., Bean, W. T., Burton, A.C. & J.S. Brashares* 2008. Accelerated human population growth at protected area edges. Science 321, 123-126. (*authors contributed equally)

Epps, C.W., Wehausen, J., Bleich, V.C., Torres, S.G & J.S. Brashares. 2007. Optimizing dispersal and corridor models using landscape genetics. Journal of Applied Ecology 44, 714-724.

Brashares, J.S. 2006. Linking human disease risk to wildlife conservation in Cameroon. Animal Conservation 9, 364-365.

Brashares, J.S. & M.K. Sam. 2005. How much is enough? Estimating the minimum sampling required for effective monitoring of African reserves. Biodiversity and Conservation 14, 2709-2722.

Brashares, J.S., P. Arcese, M.K. Sam, P.B. Coppolillo, A.R.E. Sinclair & A. Balmford. 2004. Bushmeat hunting, wildlife declines and fish supply in West Africa. Science 306, 1180-1183.

Sinclair, A.R.E., S. Mduma & J.S. Brashares. 2003. Patterns of predation in a diverse predator-prey system. Nature 425, 288-290.

Brashares, J.S. 2003. Behavioral, ecological, and life-history correlates of mammal extinctions in West Africa. Conservation Biology 17, 733-743.

Milner-Gulland, E.J., E. Bennett, K, Abernethy, M. Bakarr, R. Bodmer, J.S. Brashares, G. Cowlishaw, P. Elkan, H. Eves, J. Fa, C. Peres, C. Roberts, J. Robinson, M. Rowcliffe & D. Wilkie. 2003. Wild meat: The big picture. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 18, 351-357.

Brashares, J.S. & P. Arcese. 2002. Role of forage, habitat and predation in the behavioral plasticity of a small African antelope. Journal of Animal Ecology 71, 626-638.

Brashares, J.S., P. Arcese & M.K. Sam. 2001. Human demography and reserve size predict wildlife extinction in West Africa. Proceedings Royal Society of London: B 268, 2473-2478.

Brashares, J.S., T Garland jr. & P. Arcese. 2000. Phylogenetic analysis of coadaptation in behavior, diet, and body size in the African antelope. Behavioral Ecology 11, 452-463.

Brashares, J.S. & P. Arcese. 1999. Scent marking in a territorial African antelope: I. The maintenance of borders between male oribi. Animal Behaviour 57, 1-10.

Recent Teaching
114 - WILDLIFE ECOLOGY
H196 - HONORS RESEARCH
199 - SUPERV INDEP STUDY
201S - ESPM COLLOQUIUM
281 - Seminar in Wildlife Biology and Management
290 - SPECIAL TOPICS ESPM
298 - DIRECT GROUP STUDY
299 - INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH
300 - PROF SUPV TRAINING

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