Tali Caspi

Title: 
Postdoctoral Researcher
Bio: 

Dr. Tali Caspi is an urban ecologist studying how carnivores adjust to city life. She integrates animal behavior, organismal biology, and urban ecology to examine how the built environment shapes wildlife phenotypes across heterogeneous urban landscapes. Her research focuses on how variation in diet, behavior, physiology, and health arises in response to urbanization, with the broader goal promoting human-wildlife coexistence in cities and advancing justice-centered approaches to urban environmental challenges. Dr. Caspi is also an active science communicator, and her work has been featured in outlets including PBS, National Geographic, BBC Wildlife, and various NPR radio events.

Education

BA, Environmental Analysis, Scripps College, Claremont, CA, 2018

PhD, Ecology, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, 2025

Research Lab

Schell Lab

Mammalian Ecology and Conservation Unit (UCD, research affiliate)

Selected Publications

  • Caspi, T., Sit, E., Serrano, M.G., Vanderzwan, S.L., Smith, K.A., Merkle, W., Campbell, D., & Sacks, B.N. (2025). Urbanization facilitates intrapopulation dietary niche diversity in a generalist carnivore. Ecology Letters. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.70207

  • Caspi,T., Serrano, M.G., Vanderzwan, S.L., Kessler, J., Schell, C.J., & Sacks, B.N. (2025). Impervious surface cover and number of restaurants shape diet variation in an urban carnivore. Ecosphere 16(1), e70152. doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.70152

  • Caspi, T., Johnson, J. R., Lambert, M. R., Schell, C. J. and Sih, A. (2022). Behavioral plasticity can facilitate evolution in urban environments. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 37, 1092-1103. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2022.08.002

  • Wilkinson, C., Caspi, T., Stanton, L., & Schell, C.J. (2023). Coexistence across space and time: Social-ecological patterns within a decade of human-coyote interactions in San Francisco. People and Nature 5, 2158-2177. doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10549

  • Carlen, E.J.‡, Estien, C.O.‡, Caspi, T., Perkins, D., Goldstein, B.R., Kreling, S., Hentati, Y., Williams, T.D., Stanton, L., Des Roches, S., Johnson, R.F., Young, A.N., Cooper, C.B., & Schell, C.J. (2023). A framework for contextualizing social-ecological biases in contributory science data. People and Nature 6, 377-390. doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10592. ‡Co-first authors.

Read more at Google Scholar

Selected Honors and Awards

  • National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology Fellowship

  • Merton Love Award for best dissertation in Ecology and Evolution, UC Davis

  • Community and Citizen Science in Conservation Fellowship, School of Education, UC Davis

Research interests: 

Urban ecology, behavioral ecology

Role: 
Postdoctoral Researcher
Headshot of Tali Caspi

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