Dr. M. Shane Pruett; Post Doctoral Research Fellow

Bachelor of Science, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC
Master of Arts – Science Education, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, NJ
Doctor of Philosophy, University of Missouri – Columbia, Columbia, MO

Research Interests

Avian ecology; Population modeling; Nest ecology and predation; Individual survival and its relationship to population demographics
Successful survival and breeding are often closely tied to a species’ habitat requirements. Theory suggests that individuals may have different strategies for enhancing their fitness, and these strategies are likely tied to factors such as habitat quality, individual condition, and dominance interactions within a population. Alteration of habitat structure, either by human or natural causes, can alter how individuals interact with their environment and therefore how well they survive and reproduce.

I am broadly interested in the factors that shape populations, i.e. their demographic structure, on the landscape. I am currently involved in modeling the survival of Florida Scrub-Jays (**Aphelocoma coerulscens) during various life stages, and eventually across multiple habitat types. I am using long term breeding and survival data of the jays to model the influence of factors such as urbanization, habitat structure (time since fire, fragmentation), and individual age and condition on survival and fitness. Capture-recapture censuses and associated covariate data form the core of the survival analysis. I plan to incorporate multi-state models in later analyses to understand which individuals become breeders and which are destined to either try and fail as breeders or to spend their lives in a cooperative, non-breeding association with an established pair.

My dissertation work focused on how factors at multiple spatial and temporal scales influence passerine nest survival in two very different bottomland hardwood forest systems, as well as how territory density differs across fundamentally different habitats. As a part of this work I used program MARK to analyze point count data in a closed capture-recapture framework to estimate detection probabilities for my study species in the two forest types. I compared various methods for generating detection probabilities and am working to assess productivity differences between habitats based on nest survival and density estimates.