Natural Resource Grad Student Receives National Award

College of Natural Resources graduate student Phoebe Lehmann Zarnetske is the 2005 recipient of the Ecological Society of America's E. Lucy Braun Award. Zarnetske received the award for her poster entry, "Modeling Forest Bird Species’ Habitat with Extant Presence Points and Generated Pseudo-Absence Points in Utah," at the 90th Annual ESA and IX International Congress of Ecology meetings held earlier this semester in Montréal, Canada.

 

Zarnetske is conducting research under the supervision of Thomas Edwards, professor in the Forest, Range and Wildlife Sciences Department and assistant unit leader of the USGS Utah Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Unit. She is modeling the habitat of management indicator animal species and estimating where they are likely to occur in Utah’s forests.

 

In written comments, ESA judges said Zarnetske’s work tackled a statistically complex program and her modeling approach allowed her to use existing data to extrapolate and generate usable conclusions of direct use to the U.S. Forest Service.

 

The Braun award is named in honor of an eminent plant ecologist and the first woman president of the ESA. It is presented to one student each year.

 

Earlier this month, Zarnetske successfully defended her master’s thesis, “Modeling Indicator Species Distributions with Incomplete Data: The Case of the Missing Absence.” During the coming semester, she will continue work on projects related to her research, which is funded by the U.S. Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis. She graduates in spring 2006 with a master’s degree in ecology and plans to pursue doctoral studies.