Nathan Van Schmidt

Graduate Student

Research Description

My research interests lie at the intersection of landscape and population ecology. I am interested in developing integrated models for understanding and predicting how populations will respond to human disturbances to landscapes, especially in the context of climate change. At Berkeley, I will be working on the California Black Rail Project in the Sierra Nevada foothills and San Francisco Bay. A central focus of my research will be analyzing changes in wetland patches in the Sierra over the past decades and projecting future changes. This data on patch creation and destruction will then be integrated into metapopulation models, allowing us to understand how metapopulations function in dynamic landscapes.

I received my B.S. in Zoology and Biological Aspects of Conservation from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2009. Following graduation I began work at the International Crane Foundation, where I used geographically weighted regression to analyze the habitat selection of the breeding population of a reintroduced flock of endangered Whooping Cranes. This work formed the foundation of a predictive model I then developed to analyze the Wisconsin landscape for the optimal sites for a new reintroduction effort, now underway by the Wisconsin DNR.