United States Department of Agriculture
Dr. Duarte’s research focuses on the application of population and landscape ecology principles to better understand and predict how species respond to environmental heterogeneity across ecological and spatial scales. His research involves three major themes: (1) the development, evaluation, and application of hierarchical models to estimate the distribution, abundance, and demography of species; (2) the development of decision-support models to forecast how species will respond to future conditions; and (3) the use of remote sensing technologies to quantify change in the distribution of species and their habitats at large spatial scales. Dr. Duarte has worked with a variety of taxa on diverse issues. His current major projects include integrating monitoring, modeling, and management for marbled murrelets across the Northwest Forest Plan Area; quantifying the effects of forest management on avian communities in the Blue Mountains; examining factors related to amphibian population dynamics throughout the Pacific Northwest; co-leading a multi-agency stakeholder group through the structured decision making process to develop restoration strategies for anadromous fishes in the California Central Valley; and developing and evaluating spatially explicit hierarchical models to quantify spatiotemporal variation in the distribution and abundance of rare species.
Natural resource managers and policy makers must be able to evaluate tradeoffs in potential actions aimed at achieving multiple objectives in the face of uncertainty. Dr. Duarte’s research uses quantitative methods to integrate ecological principles with monitoring, research, and management to inform decisions and facilitate a more structured, adaptive, and transparent decision-making process to better meet conservation and management objectives.
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